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The main reason: Accessibility in many variants. E.g. I need to change font's/font colors/background colors from time to time because they are extremely exhaus

The main reason: Accessibility in many variants. E.g. I need to change font's/font colors/background colors from time to time because they are extremely exhausting for me to read, I can't do so with Flutter. Screen readers know how to process HTML, CSS. But how are they supposed to know what some "arbitrary" painted pixel are supposed to mean. And yes they already have to do a awful amount of trick due to people incorrectly (one higher semantic level) use HTML & CSS. Many of the defaults of Flutter (Web) are horrible, at least the last time I checked. E.g. text is unselectable by default instead of it being an opt in some site which have problems with stolen text content have use (and you still can steal it anyway just screenshot + OCR, duh). Lastly (some) browsers optimized for good (e.g. fast or battery friendly) HTML/CSS rendering, non of this applies to Flutter. E.g. Firefox has a pretty need parallelization of layout and rendering allowing quite awesome usages of CSS animations, non of this will ever be possible in Flutter without replacing DOM with Flutter natively, at which point we have then a Google web instead of an internet. (Through tbh. replacing HTML+CSS with some proper abstracted API of flutters inner workings is tempting, it has some quite need aspects, that is if Accessibility works by then.)

dvdkon 6y ago
A lot of work has been put into accessibility on the web, and the "semantic HTML" document model that works so poorly for apps helped too. There's no reason accessibility needs to be bad for anything non-HTML, at least not with supporting screen readers. I also think text not being selectable by default is an OK default for apps (actual desktop-grade apps, not websites with interactive elements). Right now, in 2021, it's probably a bad idea to create a web app with Flutter or any other non-DOM-based toolkit, but I don't think that will be the case forever. The native apps I use are all as good as or even better than browsers at being fast and battery-friendly. They might achieve that by being more limited and not supporting all the features and usecases of HTML5, and that's perfectly fine. It's not impossible that we'll see similar high-quality GUI frameworks inside browser runtimes.
- dathinab 6y ago
  The problem is they forcefully replacing HTML in a "inside-out" fashion without there being anything in place to allow browser accessibility tools to reasonably handle it. Sure there is no reason non HTML can't work at some point in the future if browsers and/or accessibility tools accept a new API as (a) standard for handling accessibility. But the way it currently is it is a accessibility nightmare and often even trivial things like text selection don't work because flutter defaults to not allow text selection if the programmer doesn't go out of the way to explicitly enable it. IMHO before you push something like flutter web onto people you first need to push a way to handle accessibility with it or you will hurt a bunch of people. And yes the whole semantic HTML document thing didn't work out well, but that is less so because of technical reasons but more so because: - companies just not caring, even potentially going as far as intentionally obfuscating HTML - a lot of the semantic parts not having been there from the get to go but bolted on later on. So a lot of people and material are still used to not using it. A mistake flutter is repeating just now - and wrt. non-document based applications it just doesn't fit that well, but a lot of web-apps could be done in a document based fashion, if companies and (not affected) people would care more.

dvdkon 6y ago

A lot of work has been put into accessibility on the web, and the "semantic HTML" document model that works so poorly for apps helped too. There's no reason accessibility needs to be bad for anything non-HTML, at least not with supporting screen readers. I also think text not being selectable by default is an OK default for apps (actual desktop-grade apps, not websites with interactive elements). Right now, in 2021, it's probably a bad idea to create a web app with Flutter or any other non-DOM-based toolkit, but I don't think that will be the case forever. The native apps I use are all as good as or even better than browsers at being fast and battery-friendly. They might achieve that by being more limited and not supporting all the features and usecases of HTML5, and that's perfectly fine. It's not impossible that we'll see similar high-quality GUI frameworks inside browser runtimes.

dathinab 6y ago
The problem is they forcefully replacing HTML in a "inside-out" fashion without there being anything in place to allow browser accessibility tools to reasonably handle it. Sure there is no reason non HTML can't work at some point in the future if browsers and/or accessibility tools accept a new API as (a) standard for handling accessibility. But the way it currently is it is a accessibility nightmare and often even trivial things like text selection don't work because flutter defaults to not allow text selection if the programmer doesn't go out of the way to explicitly enable it. IMHO before you push something like flutter web onto people you first need to push a way to handle accessibility with it or you will hurt a bunch of people. And yes the whole semantic HTML document thing didn't work out well, but that is less so because of technical reasons but more so because: - companies just not caring, even potentially going as far as intentionally obfuscating HTML - a lot of the semantic parts not having been there from the get to go but bolted on later on. So a lot of people and material are still used to not using it. A mistake flutter is repeating just now - and wrt. non-document based applications it just doesn't fit that well, but a lot of web-apps could be done in a document based fashion, if companies and (not affected) people would care more.