Re:Flow browser passes the Acid tests
by filleduchaos on Saturday June 13, 2020 @04:43PM
(#23512532)
People always jump to criticizing JS, but frankly HTML and CSS are my biggest pain points whenever I work with them. Any reasonably complicated UI inevitably turns into a soup of divs. Why would you stick with markup and styling heavily tailored towards documents for an application platform if you could start fresh with something else?
To be fair, CSS is making big strides in this regard with Houdini[0]. It's not yet complete but it's a much better alternative to composing divs and spans in weird ways to get the look you want.
There are some weak points for web. One of them is performance, hopefully it'll be resolved by Webassembly, so you could write performance-sensitive portions using C++ or Rust. Another one is using hardware and that's resolved by evolving web standards like WebUSB, WebGPU and so on. I don't think that replacing HTML, CSS or JS with something different would solve any actual problem in the web. They are not ideal, but they are good enough and that's all that matters.
Well, technically you could replace JS with any other language compiling into JS or Webassembly. Then you could just use one full-screen canvas and draw anything you want there, so you could use Qt or something like that. That does not require any new APIs, but I don't think that's the good idea in the long run.