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by revelation 3942 days ago
I kind of don't want to have my terminal emulator run a complete webbrowser because that's how all the cool kids now pull off the Delphi window skinning look of 2000.
4 comments

If we can have a teletype metaphor today in 2015, 40-odd (or thereabouts) years later, with the awfulness of this whole idea being a minority viewpoint, perhaps we need to just go with the web browser metaphor today, and see what comes of it by 2055.

Thanks to people insisting for years that the TTY is just fine, we don't appear have any other options. Ideally, we'd have progress - but as it is, we have nothing, or a shit sandwich. Forgive me for not going for nothing.

I think that what these JS-based UI toolkits are doing is really great, but I really dislike the idea of bundling basically a browser with the application.
There is a positive side: a built-in HTML and CSS engine allows to write very customizable interfaces.
I have a feeling that when enough things want to run "a complete web browser", what we'll get instead is a single web-browser window server process for these applications to talk to.
Wayland and its associated protocol stack is old, crufty, and written for a use case that doesn't exist anymore. We're planning to get all the major toolkits migrated to DisplayWebKit sometime within the next two years.
That's a confusing assertion. Wayland is only a few years old, and has only very recently seen anything approaching widespread usage. What do you mean by "Wayland is old"?

And, who's "we" when you say "We're planning to get all the major toolkits migrated to DisplayWebKit"?

I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just don't get where you're coming from.

I think GP's post was tongue-in-cheek; I read it that way, anyway.
Ah, too subtle for me. There are enough people looking at the world through the lens of "everything should be on the web" that it doesn't seem entirely crazy to have the browser as the display target.
I read the comment as being satirical but I find the best satire is that which could be mistaken for the genuine article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

It's supposed to be in the spirit of "what we'll hear a few years from now about Wayland" just like we're hearing it now about X11.
It's still nice sometimes to have a terminal among available Web controls. Not as a main tool, I suspect.