5 ms·

This is interesting for sure. Kudos for bringing this capability to the web! One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hi

by judah 11mo ago

This is interesting for sure. Kudos for bringing this capability to the web! One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. On my phone, I can't hard press on an image and share it to others. Screen readers can't handle it. I can't press a shortcut key to make everything larger. These all may seem pedantic, but they contribute to the feeling "this is not the real web." This is the same problem with Java applets in the late '90s, Flash and Silverlight in the early 2000s. They are islands of richness within a web page, but those islands are, well, opaque to browsers, search engines, and virtually all web tooling.

taftster 11mo ago
That's not pedantic at all! Indeed, without these capabilities, it is by some definition not the real web. This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion. But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we could have a bit of the old.
- xg15 11mo ago
  It's also an interesting question, why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome - whereas on the web I'd definitly miss it and in badly designed mobile apps, I often do. I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today. I'd also like if we could get back to selections of more complex data types at some point and not just treat everything as text. UI toolkits have all kinds of lists and treeviews to model selectable entities, whereas in the browser, there just a single huge wall of text for everything.
  - kyleee 11mo ago
    Not being able to copy text from UI interfaces is just normalization of deviancy. It should be the norm and it’s subpar when not possible imho
  - eviks 11mo ago
    > traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome You've never had to type error code/message instead of copying&pasting? Or use search to jump to a specific settings section?
    - DANmode 11mo ago
      I’ve never done it twice, I can tell you that much!
    - alasdairking 11mo ago
      On Windows, with common messages boxes, you can just do Ctrl+C for copy and you get the message box text in the clipboard. Don't know if that helps you particularly, but it is great when it works and little-known.
      - eviks 11mo ago
        Thanks, doesn't help me, but you're right, a good tip to know. Though I'd still prefer a similar option to start selection directly in the UI instead of finishing the job in a text editor, this would also help highlight text in a screenshot without having to do image post-processing! I'd even accept some arcane finger-breaking ctrl-alt-win-x-y-z (which I could rebind) for the privilege All the more annoying when such years-old fundamentals are broken in all the new "supposedly better" frameworks
  - mastazi 11mo ago
    > why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website. The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that. Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
- ttd 11mo ago
  IMHO there's no gatekeeper of what the "real" web is or should be. It grew organically - regular people building things they liked or needed. It's certainly more of a life necessity than it used to be, but that happened organically too. I know there are strongly held opinions about this, but I for one see no reason why the "application web" can't peacefully coexist, and interlink with, the document web. In my opinion it therefore makes sense to allow for different models for the application web, ones that do not revolve around a document. On the other hand, if we're just bashing on javascript being the lingua franca of the web, that's a train I'll happily board!
  - DANmode 11mo ago
    If the “application web” can’t share the text to another app, then forget that.
- Kye 11mo ago
  I've had the same thoughts as I watch YouTube slowly but steadily subsume "podcast." We were all worried about something like Spotify killing off open RSS feeds for them, but there's a growing number of people who have no idea what a podcast is because people are using the term for YouTube channels with full video and no RSS feed (video or audio) to match it. Sometimes language drift is good, but not when it's done on purpose to get rid of a free and open technology in favor of silos. "Wherever you get your podcasts" only works as long as it's built on top of an open method of syndication.
mhitza 11mo ago
I think it's the same problem that flutter web has, and probably any other canvas/wasm based backend? Those features still need to be implemented, while still missing out on accessibility?
a2128 11mo ago
Not using the standard web stuff usually means it's also an accessibility nightmare, tried using a screen reader on the demo and it doesn't work at all unfortunately
- afavour 11mo ago
  I wonder if at any point browsers will offer a low level accessibility API for you to manually describe components. I’ve worked in the web for years and I’m a big believer but it’s also indisputable that Canvas offers more performant UI rendering than HTML when done correctly. I don’t think it should ever be used for web “documents” but web apps already bastardize HTML and CSS to achieve their aims anyway. Accessibility remains the missing component.
  - shakna 11mo ago
    As far as standards is concerned, that API is ARIA [0]. W3C already offers guides for accessibility and canvas. But no one who opts for canvas turns around and remembers to do their landmarks.
    - afavour 11mo ago
      Then I’m showing my ignorance… how do you add ARIA landmarks to Canvas elements?
      - kg 11mo ago
        You would create transparent DOM elements in the right places with the right ARIA attributes and content, I suspect.
        afavour 11mo ago
        I guess that’s what I’d like to see a better API for, then. Mapping on click events for invisible elements feels like a hack.
BoorishBears 11mo ago
Am I losing it or am I looking ClearType on OSX?! I get the value in this and realize it's not for your polished -$500 ARPU consumer social apps, but man this is weird. (Also if anyone who worked on it is here, it's crashing for me on OSX 26, Chrome 142.0.7444.135, if I run an animation and hit back as the animation finishes)
cheema33 11mo ago
> I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. I was intrigued before I read this. This stuff is a non-starter for me.
- piskov 11mo ago
  Can you ctrl-f in an iphone app? Or in vlc? It’s an app, not a document.
kazinator 11mo ago
Let's move the goalposts downfield. If you can't go into developer mode and mess with the DOM, and JS, it's not real web.
- wiseowise 11mo ago
  Unironically – yes.
  - kazinator 11mo ago
    By the way my comment was likewise already unironic.
cebert 11mo ago
If this can’t support web standards it’s a nonstarter for me.
nicoburns 11mo ago
Yeah. I think you need to render to actual DOM nodes when targeting the web if you want a first class experience. We're betting on this over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus where we're building a cross-platform UI solution that enables you to do this by having a web-centric API (we are developing our own custom HTML/CSS renderer for native platforms).
LeFantome 11mo ago
MAUI was never intended for the web. This is not what Microsoft wants you to use it for. WASM is just one of the platforms that Avalonia supports and so, if you run MAUI on Avalonia, you can run it on WASM. If you do that though, it is going to be like rendering any other desktop GUI toolkit in WASM. It is not a web app. I mean, it is cool you can do it and MAUI in WASM is better than no web capability at all I guess. But you would never set out to create a web app in MAUI. MAUI on Avalonia on WASM is really a modern replacement for Silverlight. And it will likely be about as popular. The really cool thing is being able to target the Linux desktop finally. A lot of people will love that. And, while MAUI was meant to use native controls on each platform, many people may prefer the Avalonia approach of having your app render the same everywhere.
- JamesSwift 11mo ago
  Blazor+MAUI has absolutely been a focus of development from the start. What Im seeing with this is that MAUI is somewhat throwing in the towel and hoping to offload to avalonia to take the torch of development. I'm sad, because I was pretty in the weeds with MAUI at the start, as I was building a greenfield app at the time. It had a ton of potential to be a reimagining of Xamarin and how it fit into the broader .net ecosystem but they just shot themselves in the foot (both MAUI team and the broader MS dev efforts). I havent been in that space for a couple years now so maybe they have gotten better, but I doubt that. I appreciate the heroic efforts of the MAUI team, but I think its just the unfortunate reality.
DeathArrow 11mo ago
>One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. That's because MAUI is intended for mobile and desktop apps. If you want to use .NET for front-end web SPA, you can use Blazor which will behave exactly like you asked.
osigurdson 11mo ago
Agree. The examples feel a bit like I'm using a specific window in remote desktop session.
pjmlp 11mo ago
Isn't Webassembly cool? We got all the plugins back.
VikingCoder 11mo ago
I can't hit my browser's back button.
jermaustin1 11mo ago
> They are islands of richness within a web page. 1000% - as a dotnet developer with 20 years under my belt, I currently don't see the reasoning behind this. With modern browsers, CSS/JS/HTML does SO much, you just don't have XAML. I like XAML (conceptually), but there is JSX for similar functionality, and it is at least compiled into real HTML, not just a applet. I felt the same with silverlight as well. Why do we keep trying to reinvent Flash? We already have a far superior C# Flash in Unity compiled for Web (kind of a joke, but also not).

by judah 11mo ago

taftster 11mo ago

That's not pedantic at all! Indeed, without these capabilities, it is by some definition not the real web. This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion. But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we could have a bit of the old.

xg15 11mo ago
It's also an interesting question, why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome - whereas on the web I'd definitly miss it and in badly designed mobile apps, I often do. I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today. I'd also like if we could get back to selections of more complex data types at some point and not just treat everything as text. UI toolkits have all kinds of lists and treeviews to model selectable entities, whereas in the browser, there just a single huge wall of text for everything.
- kyleee 11mo ago
  Not being able to copy text from UI interfaces is just normalization of deviancy. It should be the norm and it’s subpar when not possible imho
- eviks 11mo ago
  > traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI chrome You've never had to type error code/message instead of copying&pasting? Or use search to jump to a specific settings section?
  - DANmode 11mo ago
    I’ve never done it twice, I can tell you that much!
  - alasdairking 11mo ago
    On Windows, with common messages boxes, you can just do Ctrl+C for copy and you get the message box text in the clipboard. Don't know if that helps you particularly, but it is great when it works and little-known.
    - eviks 11mo ago
      Thanks, doesn't help me, but you're right, a good tip to know. Though I'd still prefer a similar option to start selection directly in the UI instead of finishing the job in a text editor, this would also help highlight text in a screenshot without having to do image post-processing! I'd even accept some arcane finger-breaking ctrl-alt-win-x-y-z (which I could rebind) for the privilege All the more annoying when such years-old fundamentals are broken in all the new "supposedly better" frameworks
- mastazi 11mo ago
  > why, in traditional rich desktop applications, I can't say I have ever missed the ability to select and copy text from the UI I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website. The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that. Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
ttd 11mo ago
IMHO there's no gatekeeper of what the "real" web is or should be. It grew organically - regular people building things they liked or needed. It's certainly more of a life necessity than it used to be, but that happened organically too. I know there are strongly held opinions about this, but I for one see no reason why the "application web" can't peacefully coexist, and interlink with, the document web. In my opinion it therefore makes sense to allow for different models for the application web, ones that do not revolve around a document. On the other hand, if we're just bashing on javascript being the lingua franca of the web, that's a train I'll happily board!
- DANmode 11mo ago
  If the “application web” can’t share the text to another app, then forget that.
Kye 11mo ago
I've had the same thoughts as I watch YouTube slowly but steadily subsume "podcast." We were all worried about something like Spotify killing off open RSS feeds for them, but there's a growing number of people who have no idea what a podcast is because people are using the term for YouTube channels with full video and no RSS feed (video or audio) to match it. Sometimes language drift is good, but not when it's done on purpose to get rid of a free and open technology in favor of silos. "Wherever you get your podcasts" only works as long as it's built on top of an open method of syndication.

mhitza 11mo ago

I think it's the same problem that flutter web has, and probably any other canvas/wasm based backend? Those features still need to be implemented, while still missing out on accessibility?

a2128 11mo ago

Not using the standard web stuff usually means it's also an accessibility nightmare, tried using a screen reader on the demo and it doesn't work at all unfortunately

afavour 11mo ago
I wonder if at any point browsers will offer a low level accessibility API for you to manually describe components. I’ve worked in the web for years and I’m a big believer but it’s also indisputable that Canvas offers more performant UI rendering than HTML when done correctly. I don’t think it should ever be used for web “documents” but web apps already bastardize HTML and CSS to achieve their aims anyway. Accessibility remains the missing component.
- shakna 11mo ago
  As far as standards is concerned, that API is ARIA [0]. W3C already offers guides for accessibility and canvas. But no one who opts for canvas turns around and remembers to do their landmarks.
  - afavour 11mo ago
    Then I’m showing my ignorance… how do you add ARIA landmarks to Canvas elements?
    - kg 11mo ago
      You would create transparent DOM elements in the right places with the right ARIA attributes and content, I suspect.
      - afavour 11mo ago
        I guess that’s what I’d like to see a better API for, then. Mapping on click events for invisible elements feels like a hack.

BoorishBears 11mo ago

Am I losing it or am I looking ClearType on OSX?! I get the value in this and realize it's not for your polished -$500 ARPU consumer social apps, but man this is weird. (Also if anyone who worked on it is here, it's crashing for me on OSX 26, Chrome 142.0.7444.135, if I run an animation and hit back as the animation finishes)

cheema33 11mo ago

> I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. I was intrigued before I read this. This stuff is a non-starter for me.

piskov 11mo ago
Can you ctrl-f in an iphone app? Or in vlc? It’s an app, not a document.

kazinator 11mo ago

Let's move the goalposts downfield. If you can't go into developer mode and mess with the DOM, and JS, it's not real web.

wiseowise 11mo ago
Unironically – yes.
- kazinator 11mo ago
  By the way my comment was likewise already unironic.

cebert 11mo ago

If this can’t support web standards it’s a nonstarter for me.

nicoburns 11mo ago

Yeah. I think you need to render to actual DOM nodes when targeting the web if you want a first class experience. We're betting on this over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus where we're building a cross-platform UI solution that enables you to do this by having a web-centric API (we are developing our own custom HTML/CSS renderer for native platforms).

LeFantome 11mo ago

MAUI was never intended for the web. This is not what Microsoft wants you to use it for. WASM is just one of the platforms that Avalonia supports and so, if you run MAUI on Avalonia, you can run it on WASM. If you do that though, it is going to be like rendering any other desktop GUI toolkit in WASM. It is not a web app. I mean, it is cool you can do it and MAUI in WASM is better than no web capability at all I guess. But you would never set out to create a web app in MAUI. MAUI on Avalonia on WASM is really a modern replacement for Silverlight. And it will likely be about as popular. The really cool thing is being able to target the Linux desktop finally. A lot of people will love that. And, while MAUI was meant to use native controls on each platform, many people may prefer the Avalonia approach of having your app render the same everywhere.

JamesSwift 11mo ago
Blazor+MAUI has absolutely been a focus of development from the start. What Im seeing with this is that MAUI is somewhat throwing in the towel and hoping to offload to avalonia to take the torch of development. I'm sad, because I was pretty in the weeds with MAUI at the start, as I was building a greenfield app at the time. It had a ton of potential to be a reimagining of Xamarin and how it fit into the broader .net ecosystem but they just shot themselves in the foot (both MAUI team and the broader MS dev efforts). I havent been in that space for a couple years now so maybe they have gotten better, but I doubt that. I appreciate the heroic efforts of the MAUI team, but I think its just the unfortunate reality.

DeathArrow 11mo ago

>One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. That's because MAUI is intended for mobile and desktop apps. If you want to use .NET for front-end web SPA, you can use Blazor which will behave exactly like you asked.

osigurdson 11mo ago

Agree. The examples feel a bit like I'm using a specific window in remote desktop session.

pjmlp 11mo ago

Isn't Webassembly cool? We got all the plugins back.

VikingCoder 11mo ago

I can't hit my browser's back button.

jermaustin1 11mo ago

> They are islands of richness within a web page. 1000% - as a dotnet developer with 20 years under my belt, I currently don't see the reasoning behind this. With modern browsers, CSS/JS/HTML does SO much, you just don't have XAML. I like XAML (conceptually), but there is JSX for similar functionality, and it is at least compiled into real HTML, not just a applet. I felt the same with silverlight as well. Why do we keep trying to reinvent Flash? We already have a far superior C# Flash in Unity compiled for Web (kind of a joke, but also not).