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I guess that’s the part where we differ. I can’t help but see an inevitable merging between the idea of a native app and a web app until they are possible to be

by mhoad 5y ago

I guess that’s the part where we differ. I can’t help but see an inevitable merging between the idea of a native app and a web app until they are possible to be one and the same. So for me the browser is more of a rendering pipeline that can deliver DOM for pages and apps or something like canvas for “native apps”. As I was saying above I totally share that fear of sending these opaque blobs of binary data down the wire that paint arbitrary pixels that I have no control over. That isn’t how “the web” works. So you are going to need to find a way to think about accessibility APIs for example that aren’t tightly coupled to the DOM. Those things are already happening. Source maps are another important tool to maintain that slick view source experience. But I think there is a reasonable case to be made that the browser should 100% be capable of running native apps so long as they are able to play nice with the web as a platform. Note: I have to just explicitly make that distinction between pages and apps here. I don’t ever want to see this try and become the new normal for anything that would reasonably be considered “document based”. I think they can comfortably coexist each with their own specialities.

KronisLV 5y ago
While we are in disagreement, this is a really nice point: > But I think there is a reasonable case to be made that the browser should 100% be capable of running native apps so long as they are able to play nice with the web as a platform. In my eyes, the problem is that DOM seems to be what makes up the current "platform" of the web, since that's what most of the pages out there are based on, what most of the development effort is centered around and what most of the browsers work best with. That's not to say that it couldn't feasibly change in the future, or that trying to do so isn't worth the effort, but i'd definitely posit that it's extremely tricky to get that right. Flutter might not be the right tool for that job, but maybe in a decade or two someone will have borrowed some of its good ideas and built something better. Though to me it feels like any such development would need new standards to describe what could actually be in such a platform, how all of it would work and would also need to be included in all of the browsers - a true Herculean effort. Approaching the problem from the other end, by working with canvas/WASM/whatever is probably easier, since it doesn't require changes to the browser code, but in my eyes that's a bit like trying to create a 3D renderer in Excel or something, maybe going one layer of abstraction too deep (platform in platform). I might be wrong though and it all could work out yet somehow. Hopefully when it happens, it won't be a case of one large org pushing a new standard and being like: "This is how we'll approach the web now, get with the times and the APIs that we've developed."

by mhoad 5y ago

KronisLV 5y ago

While we are in disagreement, this is a really nice point: > But I think there is a reasonable case to be made that the browser should 100% be capable of running native apps so long as they are able to play nice with the web as a platform. In my eyes, the problem is that DOM seems to be what makes up the current "platform" of the web, since that's what most of the pages out there are based on, what most of the development effort is centered around and what most of the browsers work best with. That's not to say that it couldn't feasibly change in the future, or that trying to do so isn't worth the effort, but i'd definitely posit that it's extremely tricky to get that right. Flutter might not be the right tool for that job, but maybe in a decade or two someone will have borrowed some of its good ideas and built something better. Though to me it feels like any such development would need new standards to describe what could actually be in such a platform, how all of it would work and would also need to be included in all of the browsers - a true Herculean effort. Approaching the problem from the other end, by working with canvas/WASM/whatever is probably easier, since it doesn't require changes to the browser code, but in my eyes that's a bit like trying to create a 3D renderer in Excel or something, maybe going one layer of abstraction too deep (platform in platform). I might be wrong though and it all could work out yet somehow. Hopefully when it happens, it won't be a case of one large org pushing a new standard and being like: "This is how we'll approach the web now, get with the times and the APIs that we've developed."