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I feel like it's fair to say that you have not "fixed the issues with browser layout" if you lose accessibility and input. System fonts I can live without, we c
by jerf 3mo ago
I feel like it's fair to say that you have not "fixed the issues with browser layout" if you lose accessibility and input. System fonts I can live without, we can push our own, but those two things are a big deal.
Even input you might be able to hack around but accessibility is a big deal and the "hack" at that point is nearly to both lay it out in the browser and the supposed "fixed" layout system, and while that may work in some sense I again have lots of questions about whether that is really "fixed".
- nicoburns 3mo agoI mean, I agree it's not fixed. I guess I'm just saying it's not the layout engine that's the blocker. FWIW, I actually think it would be much more valuable just to fix the spec and make CSS layout fast-by-default.
- exe34 3mo agoNowadays I imagine OCR and vllms would solve that? Tesseract is incredibly fast and accurate.
- jerf 3mo agoAccessibility is not just about getting text out. It's about the navigation flow, integration into various OS features, Aria attributes in HTML and what they do. Plus you may not count this as "accessibility" but things like integrating fully with multi-lingual text entry methods. It's solvable, except for what isn't solvable because the browser doesn't expose it, which can be solved by fixing that too. But it's a lot more work than meets the eye. And building the layout engine is hard enough in the first place. Give me a week and an AI budget and I'll produce you some sort of layout engine that works when fed exactly the sorts of inputs I anticipated, but to build something that survives contact with the real world is going to be well beyond something you just prompt your way around today.