[Hixie]

We actually did try that as our first approach, but it really didn't give you the flexibility that Flutter developers expect.

As the erstwhile editor of the HTML standard for ~10 years and the now TL of Flutter I must admit that it's weird to be creating a web framework that completely ignores all the HTML stuff I worked on before. :-)

That said, Flutter is different from Flash in some important ways. Flash used the NPAPI to "break out" of the web and was basically "native" code you could escape to, whereas Flutter really is using web APIs, like Wasm, ARIA, WebGL, JS, WebComponents, and so on, to create true web apps that just happen to not use much of the control set that HTML exposes.

I suspect that even outside of Flutter, the web in general is going to move towards this kind of framework in the coming years. It just gives you so much more control. It's basically how every other platform works -- pick your language, compile to machine code, don't need to be limited to what HTML and CSS (etc) enable.

[shawnz]

> to create true web apps that just happen to not use much of the control set that HTML exposes.

That is exactly defeating the point. Flash apps were also "true web apps" that only happen to use the "limited control set" of just <embed>.

> It's basically how every other platform works

That's why there has never been a UI toolkit as successful as the web.

[Hixie]

> Flash apps were also "true web apps"

Not really. They were not portable. NPAPI was not a web standard in any meaningful sense (hint: the first N stood for Netscape).

> That's why there has never been a UI toolkit as successful as the web.

The web's success in terms of active users and in terms of deployed content is astounding, certainly. I think I'm relatively well placed to understand why, and I don't think it's because the web restricted developers to one scripting language or one set of controls. I think it is very much _despite_ that.

[ComputerGuru]

Really not fair to compare against flash in this way when wasm wasn’t available and npapi was the only option. That is additionally an implementation detail, Adobe could (theoretically) revive and port flash to wasm today without breaking the majority of applications.

[Hixie]

I would have had much less of a problem with Flash if it had been a runtime built with web technologies like that.

[BystanderX]

So this is already a pretty toasty section of comments so let me put this to you. If you've already answered this elsewhere, please let me know.

I would be surprised if someone heavily involved in the Web's development process for a long time didn't have some really sore spots about it.

That aside:

--

What do you think of the loss of opportunities for learning and customization that moving to an opaque system running "in" the web (flutter) implies?

How did you get into the Web? Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

Have you gotten value from the ability to quickly use others' extensions of useragent behavior that seem highly unlikely to work with this approach? Or will they be able to?

Fairly loaded questions I guess, but realistic ones too, not just philosophical.

[munificent]

> Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

I got into web design/programming in the 90s, and the answer is basically no. Sure you could poke around a bit, but I never found it to be a revelation. I still had to buy books, read blogs, and do a ton of trial and error. Also, it was a never-ending game of trying to testing to see what each new browser release added or broke.

We are in infinitely better position today thanks to open source. The "View Source" of today is GitHub. Want to write a high-performance dynamically typed language VM? Here: https://github.com/v8/v8 Build an operating system? OK: https://github.com/torvalds/linux Build a database? Here you go: https://github.com/postgres/postgres

[Hixie]

> What do you think of the loss of opportunities for learning and customization that moving to an opaque system running "in" the web (flutter) implies?

Not sure what you really mean. If you mean the loss of "View Source" then I think we lost that a long time ago for anything but the most trivial of pages.

I used to say that view source was why the web was successful, and maybe it did help at the start, but I think we sailed past the point where view source stopped being useful years ago. Everything now is minified, and sites are too complicated for anyone to pick out what's going on from the original source let alone the actual served source...

> How did you get into the Web? Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

I'm a weird case, I got into the web by reading the standards. (Then I got annoyed the browsers didn't follow them, so I got into browser QA. Then I got annoyed that the standards weren't clear enough to allow test cases to be written, and I started editing the specs.)

> Have you gotten value from the ability to quickly use others' extensions of useragent behavior that seem highly unlikely to work with this approach? Or will they be able to?

I have not. A lot of people do like extensions though.

Other platforms have managed to get concepts like extensions, e.g. on Linux (well, X really) I can replace my window manager, on Windows I can install DLLs that add features to Windows Explorer, on Android the "share" button can share to a list of applications, etc. There's lots of examples.

[BystanderX]

Thanks for your reply.

> Not sure what you really mean. [...] sites are too complicated for anyone to pick out what's going on from the original source let alone the actual served source...

I agree, View Source itself has become less and less useful. The Devtools in most browsers have kept up fairly well though. They provide a lot of methods to understand, debug, and modify behavior of whatever you're running using HTML/CSS/JS, even if not perfect.

Perhaps if Flutter became mainstream enough that there's theoretically nothing stopping this from eventually happening for it as well. That's an interesting thought.

--

I suppose that leaves my last question, and it leans away from what might be a practical view from your position: Do you think flutter pushing for major market share while also trying to replace the core part of the web (HTML/CSS/JS -> Canvas renderer/wasm) is a good thing for the web's health and future?

(That's a good bit more philosophical, but I hope in #CURRENTYEAR we're starting to see value asking long-term questions like that, especially from inside of the giant companies. I'll stick to one of those kinds of questions)

--

> I'm a weird case, I got into the web by reading the standards. (Then I got annoyed the browsers didn't follow them, so I got into browser QA. Then I got annoyed that the standards weren't clear enough to allow test cases to be written, and I started editing the specs.)

That is interesting, thanks for sharing that.

> I have not. A lot of people do like extensions though.

Also interesting, fair enough.

> Other platforms have managed to get concepts like extensions, e.g. on Linux (well, X really) I can replace my window manager, on Windows I can install DLLs that add features to Windows Explorer, on Android the "share" button can share to a list of applications, etc. There's lots of examples.

Perhaps a good new question is what kind of tooling is available or planned for users to interact with Flutter applications? Such as what Devtools provide, or an expansion to them directly.

As a developer, the Devtools are absolutely critical to my workflow and ability to learn from and often fix issues I have with other sites.

(It could be pointed out that native applications don't tend to have that functionality, so it shouldn't be expected.. but in this context we're talking about effectively removing it from the Web, which does)

[Hixie]

I mean, I try to use Devtools on other sites, but I haven't really had any real success with that for years. I don't know how many of the rest of the web's ~4 billion users try to use DevTools but I can't imagine it's anything close to a majority. Or even a large minority.

FWIW Flutter isn't trying to replace the web. We're trying to offer a way of writing web apps that aren't really possible today. For example, something like the Flutter Folio demo, which works on multiple platforms including web, was written in a few weeks. I cannot fathom how I would do that without Flutter.

[oblio]

Well, good luck maintaining all of that 10 years from now. I can bet on the web being around, well developed and maintained in 2031.

[Hixie]

I'm not really sure what you mean by "all of that". What I described _is_ the web.

[oblio]

It's painting stuff in a canvas and not using the standard web controls.

It's the web in the sense that almost every UI toolkit also offers a canvas (for example Tk does this) and you can reimplement every control using it. That doesn't make your new toolkit in a toolkit Tk.

[Hixie]

But why would an app that writes to a WebGL canvas be any harder to maintain than an app that uses HTML controls? If anything, it'd be likely to be easier to maintain -- we (the web standards community) are much more likely to change how a particular element is supposed to work than to change WebGL in an incompatible way.

[oblio]

The app? It won't be harder to maintain, yes.

But the framework? That will have to be updated when each OS the framework runs on changes.

The HTML controls are used by a ton of stuff, so they're quite likely to be updated. Your framework? I have to really, really trust you that you'll update them.

Look at how Motif or GTK or AWT or Swing or Tk widgets look on modern OSes. There's an entire graveyard of cross platform UI libraries out there.