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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 acc

by 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.

by dvdkon 6y ago

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.