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You might like this article then, by the team lead of Flutter. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit?resourcekey

You might like this article then, by the team lead of Flutter. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC3KVdAlLGOsK6gFoEOD0/edit?resourcekey=0-bPajpoo9IBZpG__-uCBE6w https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696

kevincox 2y ago
That sounds awful. Some of my favourite thing about the web are the semantics. This like links that have common shortcuts across all sites (like open in new tab) and a rich contect menu (send to another device, archive at archive.org). I have extensions to translate text to find URL anchors in documents. If the web primatives where WebHID + WebGPU every site would lack any of these. Of course this would come from the Flutter people who don't seem to care about this. Flutter on web is completely unusable and often Android and desktop versions are barely tolerable.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  There's no reason extensions can't be made for it as well, HTML and CSS in the browser is just rendered via Skia anyway, so it's not much different to keep the renderer but change out the underlying languages. This is in fact exactly what Flutter does.
  - hollowturtle 2y ago
    How do you read text out of a bunch of pixels rendered on a canvas? Yes the dom is eventually rendered by Skia but still exposes an api for querying the underlying structure
    - satvikpendem 2y ago
      Flutter also exposes the semantics tree via the DOM so you can actually still target elements, but yeah if you want to target the WebGPU elements, there needs to be a new API for that, which I believe there will be in the future because a lot of WebGPU renderer are coming out, in Dart, Rust, C#, etc.
mananaysiempre 2y ago
By the prominent semantic markup advocate and Web standards developer Ian “Hixie” Hickson, who now works on Flutter and, it seems, gave up on the Web. The article proposes a modern riff on the Flash VM more or less.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  The HN link goes into depth on why he gave up on the web, it's quite an interesting read.
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    It really is, it’s just that I don’t want to live in the world where his proposal is the main way to discover and deliver information. His solution to semantics going unused is motivated in the last paragraph, and I just can’t bring myself to feel any of the enthusiasm the writing attempts to convey: > The parts of the web that have actually delivered are the ephemerality and the security model, the indexability (but only for content, not apps), deep linkability, and the platform-independence. We can keep all those, and throw out the decades of legacy that's holding us back, and we will lose nothing, we will only gain as we unleash the kinds of amazing interfaces that developers can build when you give them the raw bedrock APIs that other platforms already give their developers. I also have to admit I simply don’t—can’t—trust a proposal to make the (path of least resistance of the) Web less inspectable when it comes from the general direction of Google, even when it’s honest-to-goodness Hixie writing one upon evidently deep reflection; the same way I don’t trust a proposal to make a compiler toolchain collect user data by default when it comes from that direction, even when it’s honest-to-goodness Russ Cox writing one upon evidently deep reflection. (In the case of Go telemetry, I still remember how Cox responded to a privacy-related question I raised on HN—but don’t even remember now—by proposing the organization maintain an anonymizing proxy for its many employees. Which was a fairly satisfactory solution, if you’re an organization and have many employees. And it seemed clear his mind had no other cases in its working set. Maybe it’s just something in the air there.) I don’t mean to pass judgment here, to be clear. Hixie in particular has done more to improve the open Web than most people whose explicit job it was to improve the open Web, let alone web programmers, let alone programmers in general (the only cohort of those to which I can lay even a vague claim of membership). I don’t even mean that my upfront bias here is correct or should be emulated by anybody. I only mean to warn you that I’m just unable to engage with the proposal without considering its source, most of all emotionally, so you should keep that in mind when I say it and its apparent excitement feel bleak, like a coat of bright paint on a rusty playground slide in the midst of a concrete Constructivist slum.

kevincox 2y ago

That sounds awful. Some of my favourite thing about the web are the semantics. This like links that have common shortcuts across all sites (like open in new tab) and a rich contect menu (send to another device, archive at archive.org). I have extensions to translate text to find URL anchors in documents. If the web primatives where WebHID + WebGPU every site would lack any of these. Of course this would come from the Flutter people who don't seem to care about this. Flutter on web is completely unusable and often Android and desktop versions are barely tolerable.

satvikpendem 2y ago
There's no reason extensions can't be made for it as well, HTML and CSS in the browser is just rendered via Skia anyway, so it's not much different to keep the renderer but change out the underlying languages. This is in fact exactly what Flutter does.
- hollowturtle 2y ago
  How do you read text out of a bunch of pixels rendered on a canvas? Yes the dom is eventually rendered by Skia but still exposes an api for querying the underlying structure
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Flutter also exposes the semantics tree via the DOM so you can actually still target elements, but yeah if you want to target the WebGPU elements, there needs to be a new API for that, which I believe there will be in the future because a lot of WebGPU renderer are coming out, in Dart, Rust, C#, etc.

mananaysiempre 2y ago

By the prominent semantic markup advocate and Web standards developer Ian “Hixie” Hickson, who now works on Flutter and, it seems, gave up on the Web. The article proposes a modern riff on the Flash VM more or less.

satvikpendem 2y ago
The HN link goes into depth on why he gave up on the web, it's quite an interesting read.
- mananaysiempre 2y ago
  It really is, it’s just that I don’t want to live in the world where his proposal is the main way to discover and deliver information. His solution to semantics going unused is motivated in the last paragraph, and I just can’t bring myself to feel any of the enthusiasm the writing attempts to convey: > The parts of the web that have actually delivered are the ephemerality and the security model, the indexability (but only for content, not apps), deep linkability, and the platform-independence. We can keep all those, and throw out the decades of legacy that's holding us back, and we will lose nothing, we will only gain as we unleash the kinds of amazing interfaces that developers can build when you give them the raw bedrock APIs that other platforms already give their developers. I also have to admit I simply don’t—can’t—trust a proposal to make the (path of least resistance of the) Web less inspectable when it comes from the general direction of Google, even when it’s honest-to-goodness Hixie writing one upon evidently deep reflection; the same way I don’t trust a proposal to make a compiler toolchain collect user data by default when it comes from that direction, even when it’s honest-to-goodness Russ Cox writing one upon evidently deep reflection. (In the case of Go telemetry, I still remember how Cox responded to a privacy-related question I raised on HN—but don’t even remember now—by proposing the organization maintain an anonymizing proxy for its many employees. Which was a fairly satisfactory solution, if you’re an organization and have many employees. And it seemed clear his mind had no other cases in its working set. Maybe it’s just something in the air there.) I don’t mean to pass judgment here, to be clear. Hixie in particular has done more to improve the open Web than most people whose explicit job it was to improve the open Web, let alone web programmers, let alone programmers in general (the only cohort of those to which I can lay even a vague claim of membership). I don’t even mean that my upfront bias here is correct or should be emulated by anybody. I only mean to warn you that I’m just unable to engage with the proposal without considering its source, most of all emotionally, so you should keep that in mind when I say it and its apparent excitement feel bleak, like a coat of bright paint on a rusty playground slide in the midst of a concrete Constructivist slum.