|
I'm working on a new framework that attempts to take what I think are the best ideas from the web (zero installation, easy to lay things out without tracking measurements yourself) and combines them with the best ideas from React (functions as components, ideally no mutable state). I want to solve what I see as the original sin of the web: inept separation of presentation from content. The other thing I aim to solve is the issue of the browser and corresponding web standards being a monolith so large that only Google and Apple can afford to implement them. By wrestling back control over layout, I hope to show that a next-generation browser could be much more like what James Mickens laid out with the research he presented in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI I decided to prototype it in JavaScript, and right now it just renders into a canvas element. I love working on it, because all the unit tests run really fast. It can do that because there's no browser in the way - node-canvas is much lighter weight. Once the design is settled down, I'd like to rewrite it in Rust. The other advantage of this is that it is incremental. It'll run in any existing web browser, and building a cut-down browser that isn't web-compatible is doable in a few weekends. The best way to see its capabilities so far is to look at the test screenshots: https://github.com/maxharris9/layout/tree/master/test/screen... - see especially text-actual.png, text-concave-cutout-actual.png, text-diamond-actual.png. I fell down a rabbit-hole with that a bit and made it wrap text around arbitrary polygons, hyphenating on syllable breaks and everything. I just lost my job a couple of weeks ago, and I've been taking time off to work more on this thing. Tomorrow I hope to get mouse click events tracked through the component tree. And at some point in a week or two, when that's done, I really should write the application that I had in mind for it! I know a lot of people have concerns about accessibility with the approach I've taken, and all I can say to that is, please help me work on that instead of criticizing me. I know there is talk about an accessibility DOM coming in browsers, but I fear that I'll just have to fall back to rendering plain HTML in order to drive screen readers, which is a terribly inefficient and indirect way of doing things. Also I don't even know where to begin with screen readers, what's the most popular software for that, etc. |