[aconbere]

Being a webapp and adding GPU rendering are not orthogonal. Figma for instance famously renders it's UI in WebGL.

While I mostly agree that creators of today's web forget that there are a number of simple techniques to render fast pages, there are also a bunch of places where the HTML+CSS+JS web technologies serve us poorly.

* Content Editable is a terrible editing canvas

* Dom and CSS are pretty terrible core animation primitives

* DOM and CSS make for pretty poor interactive graphics capabilities

And in these cases WebGL offers some interesting alternatives to explore.

[spankalee]

Figma renders its documents with WASM/WebGL, but the UI of the app is just HTML.

A fully GPU rendered web app is almost the worst of both worlds. You'll generally have massive code bundles and terrible a11y.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I remember when I first tried Flutter+Dart and was really put-off by how it rendered to <canvas>, then later versions did use the DOM but looked like the worst case of divitis I’ve ever seen, it even made React.js’s output look handwritten.

But why do people do this? I note that a big problem with the web, as-is today, is how anemic and inflexible HTML’s standard <input> elements are, which forces devs to build their own widgets (often poorly), maybe use a framework like Angular, and then eventually go all-in on web abstractions like Flutter/Blazor/etc. If HTML were better then many (but far from all) of these cases could be avoided - for instance, I don’t understand why HTML still doesn’t have absolutely basic widgets like a combobox, a single-line textbox that wraps, a date-range input, hierarchical drop-downs (optgroup is single-level), defined styling and non-text content of <select>, and so on… (though we did recently get color and range/sliders - though there’s still cross-browser quirks which hamper adoption).

I hated the days of ActiveX like everyone, but when you’re building an internal-only (I.e. IE-only) webpage it was neat that we could pull-in any of the standard Windows controls - and plenty others - into a page and it would just-work. And you got accessibility for free too, which is more than what you get with <canvas>-based frameworks still - or a multi-megabyte JS/WASM bundle download either (or an npm-based build system that breaks every time you update your dependencies…) ]. Okay yes I’m jaded.

[auggierose]

Content Editable seems to be quite good these days, if you don't use it as is, but are willing to layer a framework on top of it. I tried Lexical, but am now going to roll my own, but still entirely based on HTML/CSS and ContentEditable. No WebGL required, although I might very well use it for a particular editing component.