[asiachick]

Flutter, because it's using canvas, doesn't play well with text input for non E-FIGS languages. Even when it does work it's a 2nd class experience. Open a flutter demo, switch your OS to a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, type some CJK, watch as it shows placeholders while it goes and downloads fonts. Now try to select the text and use the OS's reconversion features (something you might not be aware of if you don't regularly use non-roman character languages) Install some language or accessibility helper extension. Go run a Flutter demo. Watch as the extension has no way to find the text because there is no text to find, just pixels.

That flutter even got this far strongly suggests the people making it are monocultural. That they are thinking "maybe someday there will be a solution" is not the right way to approach building an inclusive GUI framework in this day and age.

[wffurr]

Aha, I think we misunderstood your initial post. You meant "non-English and non-FIGS" languages. Thanks for replying with additional context. I definitely learned a few things.

I see what you mean about Flutter having to download the 16+ MB CJK fonts and lack of visibility for extensions trying to read DOM text. It's possible there's fixes for some of these: the browser local font API could make your local system's fonts available to the Flutter runtime, which would be significantly faster, and the accessibility object model could make content visible to extensions (but only if they were rewritten to read AOM data!).

Also TIL about "reconversion" in CJK IMEs. Pretty neat!

I'm working with some of these same issues right now with a web-based PDF viewer app that runs PDFium in WebAssembly. Trying to make PDF content visible to extensions, IMEs, etc. the same way DOM content is turns out to be quite difficult.

Still, all of this works out of the box with DOM content. It's frustrating how many of these things have given up on "render to DOM".