> Flutter is also learning to get along better with the web. Previously, Flutter developers had to choose whether they wanted web builds to render with the HTML renderer – producing a combination of HTML elements, CSS, Canvas elements, and SVG elements – or with the CanvasKit renderer, which produces graphics rather than readable source code. Its latest trick is element embedding, which lets Flutter content be added to any web page within a <div> element. It thus becomes part of the Document Object Model (DOM) and can be manipulated using CSS selectors and transformations.
CanvasKit continues to terrify me as one of the utmost & highest existential threats to the web; instead of a hypertext engine it turns the web into a way to push pixels in people's faces, and the "canvas" mentality is an evil one.
So I'm not sure whether to be happy about the news here or more distressed. CanvasKit can seemingly now interoperate alongside the html+svg native renderer, rather than be all consuming. On the one hand, yay, folks are less likely to completely wreck the experience & build some purely forsaken Flash like anti-web hell. But now it may be easier to mix little Flash-isms in, little daubs of anti-web, and god-forbid that give CanvasKit enough wiggle room to start making it in the door.
> "Historically, people built for the web using the Document Object Model and HTML," explained Sneath. "And that was kind of the only way to build web apps. Now, over the last couple of years, between Canvas and WebAssembly, we've got these new technologies that enable a different class of web app experience. And so Flutter is unapologetically aiming at that next-generation class."
Very sad to hear such a strongly anti-web, chest-thumping, perspective so prominently featured. This isn't a different class of web app; if you abandon the DOM you strip away user-agency, you blow up user-extensions, you wreck all the accessibility tools, then you've reduced the web to an app delivery platform. The "next-generation class" sounds like "we use the web as an app delivery platform". It sounds ok for developers, terrible for everyone else.
> We're aiming at this next class of apps that look very much like the kinds of apps that Flutter is designed to solve – high graphical fidelity, offering pixel level of control over apps, having a canvas where you can draw and manage every part of the environment yourself." ®
Canvas just isn't very web. It's not malleabe, it's not flexible. Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sounds like a worse betrayal of the web than last time, like a worse deal for users.
This idea that user-agency is irrelevant, that hypermedia & exchange of information is not on the radar at all, the maximalist view that pushing pixels in people's faces is the only thing that matters continues to strike me as anti-human, as destructive & detrimental to humankind, for some very top-down-control oriented short-term wins. It's poisoning what we might build, to enable a very narrow clade of people to dictate to the world what we can ever do. Seeing the ethos so strongly said is a revolting thing to keep seeing, & it's said with such obvious lack of concern for the user. I really wish someone would reel these spokespeople in a bit, & have some balance, show some respect for user-agency, but the whole project feels like a bank against that, caring only for appdev. This is why I always thought webdev was so good: it permitted the whole world to also be stakeholders, where-as apps have always been too afraid to negotiate control.
Anyhow... while Fuchsia is getting a lot of coverage as a part of the recent layouts, it's remarkable how wildly high-profile the efforts here in Flutter are. Building a new rendering engine, Flutter? Wow. The Skia rendering engine has, so far, been the one Google-ism in the stack that has been uncontested, untouched, uncompeted with, and now there's competition.
I think I've seen your comments before about this topic, both here and perhaps on Reddit, but definitely on Slack (I think I talked with you there but it seems you were kicked out of that Slack group for whatever reason). While I do like the DOM, I don't think anyone is "viewing source" of web apps, and other platforms like desktop or mobile don't have that viewability either, not even to their detriment, so I feel that the canvas-ification of the web is nothing new or major, it simply will become as those other platforms are.
The web as it exists today is not sacrosanct (but it seems like you think it so), if I can get better performance out of WASM, canvas and generally eschewing the DOM, I will use that solution. Your comments are much more vehement than they need to be, IMO, like "anti-human?" It's just a browser, chill out [0]. Seems some your other comments are similarly vehement and vitriolic beyond the proportion of the topic you talk about in each one.
Telling me to "chill out" and belittling my belief that the web is distinct does not demonstrate good faith on your part. I'd be happy to discuss why I think abandoning the web & hypertext as a common interchange is anti-human & beastly, but you don't seem interested in discussion or exploration. You've spent your time tearing me down & spreading casual sleight & disdain for the only successful online connected information space humanity has made.
I don't feel like any kind of conversation here is possible. You have soundly refused to entertain the idea that perhaps the web has value or is distinct or improved over apps. You seem to only value apps & see nothing wrong with supplanting a rich connected standards-based information space with a bunch of pixels being shoved in people's faces. That's your perogative I guess, but if we aren't willing to see the other's values there's not much discussion really possible.
I stand by my stance that throwing away interoperable information standards like html is anti-human. I continue to find the web to be far above everything else, far more adaptable & flexible than any other computing medium. You out of hand reject view source, but to me, it is an alive & powerful capability, that lets us explore, extend, & adapt these amazing online systems we run across. There is a huge wide ecosystem of web extensions, that people seem to care quite a lot about based on the many discussions happening here on HN, based on download count, and what Flutter is proposing is an extreme existential threat to that user-agency, which is powered 100% by the "view-source" capability you have given not the smallest iota of respect to, have said is worthless. I'm not sure how, given the evidence provided by the countless extensions people use and love, you could claim something so callous & make such belittling remarks.
I've tutored a number of newcombers to computer science & programming via some web scripting, modifying the online experiences they were already having, by asking them for something about a site that annoys them, and then building a userscript to improve or address; it's a problem-oriented way to understand programming & the web medium. This has enormous value, is a pro-human engagement that the web shines at & makes possible; it's instantly gratifying to see we can work with the computer, work with what is, shape it. There is, for example, https://malleable.systems , dedicated to this virtue of modifyability. Where-as in apps the kind of cruel cold hard "pixel perfect precision" & top-down ownership-by-corporation is the anti-human basis most work is executed under. To me, this is a sucking void of value, a bleak sad world, far less than the interoperable places of information we ought have, and a massive step back.
From your current stance, there doesn't seem to be any possibility you might be willing to consider any of the virtues I think are important. You've picked a very narrow set of values you will recognize, and disregarded outside principles & values. I'm not sure how we can converse about this & make progress, given that you won't permit nor acknowledge any of my values or beliefs, give no credence to web extensions nor systems with viewable source. I have at least recognized some of the expedience, the desires of app developers to have their control & speed; I just think it must be a complement to other things, & not total. Your views have totally rejected the web, for what feels to me like a largely egocentric set of values/priorities. I just wish this platform would not be on the web, if it has such savage abandon in disregarding the interoperable base values & virtues that have, so far, defined the web. Flutter is standing up to be the next anti-inter-operable Flash, it's own weird corporate-controlled antii-user penitentiary within the web, and that is for sure a horror & damaging.
(I do not believe I have ever been on the slack? My password manager does not have any such logins nor do I recall joining.)
My "chill out" comment was not related to your thoughts on the DOM, it was due to your use of very extreme language to explain things that did not seem to merit such extremity. I linked "anti-human" above but I was able to find multitudinous other comments with words like "repulsive," "reprehensible," "cruel," "shitty," and so on. Your comment history seems filled with vitriol, and it is why I made such a comment. This is probably why your Twitter account is now suspended, on which I used to talk to you before but it appears not recently. It was a DC Tech Slack if I recall correctly by the way, you had some extreme opinions there too and used the same vitriolic language that then got you kicked out. It seems like the same pattern persists, where you were using the words above but then people got sick of it and then you tried to argue that you were commenting in good faith, or that others weren't (even though they perfectly were).
Personally, I agree with you on the role of the DOM, but again, I do not see it as religiously as you do, in my view it is just a technology. I like to read content, sure, and that's where I see the value of the DOM. I also use quite a lot of browser extensions and would not like them to go away, such as adblockers. I don't see them going away though, the DOM is simply too entrenched for content.
However, at the same time, I like fast and rich applications. I do not like using Electron, which is part of the very same web technology you so like. I would rather not have to pull up a browser for every single app I use. Wasting pointless CPU cycles and gigabytes of RAM, now that is anti-human, not to mention anti-Earth, since they consume more electricity and give off more greenhouse gas emissions by doing so, simply to interpret Javascript in a virtual machine. That is why I like stuff like Flutter. I don't particularly care that users can't modify it, because, again, as an app, there is nothing you necessarily need to modify, and on mobile and desktop anyways, people can't "inspect element" and change things. It provides me with a fast, unified programming interface on which I can build apps. You can still have interoperability with stuff like that, such as Mastodon which uses federation, even though users again can't directly modify the source code, at least on their mobile apps.
Your opinion is fine, liminally. I even agree with parts of it. It becomes quite annoying to hear though when it becomes almost religious in the nature of your belief, where for those you disagree, you start spewing vitriol instead. It is especially grating when you are there on almost every Flutter thread on HN, and elsewhere. If you really want people to discuss with you in good faith, I recommend you stop using words like "cruel," "repulsive," "repugnant," "vile" and so on. People can smell the salt a mile away.
The web is the only "good" tech we share, & this is a cruel & ruinous way to reimpose a repugnant Flash back on the world.
Thank you for making an effort to acknowledge some other sides of the issue. I am sympathetic to anti-Electron views. To me it's ridiculous we have Electron. The web should have better answers so that the secure multi-tenant virtual machine we have (the actual browser) can be re-used. But PWAs are still too limited/conservative, the platform growth kept so slow & with too few parallel efforts/implementers, & we lack any kind of sidecar of system-capabilities to extend them with just-enough systems capabilities (like Electron gives us). So we have the terrible cost of redistributing/reinstantiating the entire virtual machine, a sad waste. There's room for other efforts beyond this (ex: Tauri). But this is just one struggle. Overall the web platform is not to blame for most crimes attributed to it; native apps with massive ad networks & telemetry are also slow & many are bloated (with worse start times by far), & going the other way, webapps like vscode prove amazing super-fast full-featured apps are possible. Neither the web nor native can guard against bad app architecture. But seeing the web taken over by Flash again is a great technosocial regression, a massive injury to ourselves that is indeed vile. We need more principled path to improvement, something that maintains the core distinct advantage of the web medium, not paves it over (as your mobile & desktop excuse does). The excuse that there are some bad webapps in existence doesn't cut it for me, isn't the totalizing proof it's made out to be, to justify smashing it, especially give how many slick smooth counter-examples abound.
Last, I really really really do not appreciate your social muckraking/stalking. These incidents still hurt me, still leave me feeling left flat. Should I have told Twitter Never Trumpers they are just as bad and to get in the sea? Meh, maybe not? (Im still unclear whether I have real remorse on replying with that fatal comment.) Did I overreact when someone posted a shit ton of guns into our DC Tech Slack channels, when they reacted fliply & without visible reprise when others asked them to stop or show respect, over numerous hours? Yes, I did overreact, wasnt as metered as I ought have been. But that ban & most of the other brow-beatings I got from one particular mod on DC Tech slack & from no-one else feel completely out of whack & absurdly lopsided time & time again. It feels impossible to survive these networks, to me, that, over decades of posting some beef or dustup will cause heck & some day I (and many other active participants) just wont emerge out from whatever mod is calling the shots that day. Good behavior is good for nothing to my name, earns no credit. And I put in so much assistance faith trust optimism & belief everywhere I go anyways, because I am motivated by a strong belief, by hope for technology, by hope we can all get better together. Mods remember only the bad & strikes are never forgiven. This is a cruel & uncaring system, one my protests against have only brought trouble down on me for.
In general, fuck off. Fuck you for personally dragging on me, over this beaten complex old history of mine. That's extremely low life mean shit thing to do, over something you know not fucking at all. I burst with enthusiasm & positivity & people were shocked & stunned when I got banned from DC Tech Slack, because I was a helper, a good participant. I think not but maybe I do deserve all these bad things and maybe I am as awful & horrible as you would make me out to be. But I believe if not in the execution at least in basic good & dignity of almost every single strike or ban I've gotten anywhere, and it sucks enormously having a decade of connection ripped away with no recourse offered. Having you track my faults across decades & come to spit in my face & cancel me with vagaries, to score some points against me on this one topic, is an unjust misdeed of much much lower character & decency than anything I have ever gotten banned for. You call me to task as an overexaggerator, a crier of wolf, a disruptor of the public for my harsh words, yet your actions against me contain real intent to harm & cause damage, have acted with cruelty & personal animosity. Lay off your scrooging me; regardless of how my words "quite annoy" you and how frustrating it is being exposed to another's belief, to a care that you happen to disagree with. Smell & see your own salt.
Do I regret demonizing this tech? Currently no. There is a need for alarm, a clear & present danger & need to call attention to great harm, that I think the path it has makes it insidiously hard to notice the downside of, to recognize in time for what it is. I wont apologize for pointing out the toxic dangers here, dont see what options I have to deescalate my alarm over this topic. I will try to focus more on the positive, to spend more time raising up what is good, what it is that is worth believing in. But there is still an enormously dangerous cliff we ride the cusp of here, where users end up with nothing, no agency at all, interoperability ends, and that is anti-human, that is a terrible terrible plight.
It's not like I follow all of your social media movements, I just see you a lot on specific types of threads on HN and other places like that Slack, and I just remembered that incident, that's it.
However, words have consequences. You posted in public fora and I am free to comment on the patterns I see there. If you feel offended (and feel "cruel and personal animosity") by me pointing out your own words and how those words make other people feel (enough to ban in you in several places, it looks like), then that's really on you, to be honest. I linked a few places where other people feel the same way, and you know what they say about common denominators.
You shared two links. One of them is slightly over the top & impolite as you say, but it's hardly worth hiding your children over & running-me-out over. The other seems totally fine? Also, hugely humorously to me, it results in the "defender" calling this a new Flash & saying that's ok! I found that hilarious. Thanks for reminding me.
But I also found 22 other links, on HN alone, and there's probably some more. Few have anything like the dangerous impoliteness you want me ran-off for. I think I could probably find slightly less polite things to say if I wanted to. It's easy to highlight some conveniently polarizing words, but in context, I think it's pretty clear & understandable where I'm coming from.
> and how those words make other people feel (enough to ban in you in several places, it looks like)
First: you did not post these words. Not in the least. If you had, we might have something to discuss & debate & I would not be as presently mad as I have been for the past 24 hours. You just alluded so there having been some kind of words, once, and invent a a deeply negative portrayal of me suitable to your mean-spirited heartless task of casting me aside, that has nothing to do with reality. It has nothing to do with other people's feelings & how I made people feel. It just has to do with your little petty crusade, to make me look bad, to injure me.
You bullied & browbeat me over some vague incident you don't really know or understand, cruelly. I responded the first time with generous sincerity far beyond what your ignorant snub deserved, & talked through the pain & difficulty surrounding these issues, & their complexity. I put some kind of substance to the completely empty airless taunting accusations you made.
And you turned right back around & used the same mean, small, petty, short & trite baseless form to reduce me, ignoring the only iota of substances we had in this discussion to once again make diffuse meanspirited & cruel accusation, entirely without substance or merit.
These words you've written this time just double down on showing your character, showing the caliber of character you bring. I know what I have been defending, I know what principles & virtues have motivated me in talking about CanvasKit (and have been quite transparent about my position, across many years now), but I keep grasping to understand what motivates you so deeply to act so small & so pettily to someone, to resort so heavily to attacks on my character, of which you know so little?
Two links out of many, I just did not want or need to link all of them. Regardless, the irony is quite thick. You seem offended by my words, as you mentioned, yet in the same breath don't seem to comprehend that your own words might have made other people feel a similar level of offense as you now feel. It really does feel like a "rules for me and not for thee". Do you really not see the irony of this fact?
Anyway, HN is not the forum for these types of squabbles. I've noticed your comments for a long time and just now did I point them out. I will not need to point them out further, I suppose.
> You seem offended by my words, as you mentioned, yet in the same breath don't seem to comprehend that your own words might have made other people feel a similar level of offense as you now feel.
You targeted your words against a person. You went out of your way to invent malicious stories to tell, twisting some stalkerish facts you had at your disposal to suit your narrative without having any real sense of what happened. Then showing not the smallest iota of remorse or emapthy, you doubled down on your shitty low-grade deliberately-cruel deceit when some actual facts were injected we could have discussed.
I targeted my grievances against ideas, against actual real harm being done to computing & to users.
Yet you continue with unbecoming nasty backhanding retorts, once again using insults & being derogatory to try to claim the upper hand:
> Regardless, the irony is quite thick.
Is it? Really?
I have said again and again that turning the web into a giant display of bitmaps is extremely bad for society. Like, destructive of the most critical fundamental gain information-society has ever had. Turning back the only semi-fair-shake the users of the world have gotten in computing, getting some bit of computing that has a common understandable modifiable substrate, whence upon extensions & a host of user-agencies have been built. Ruining that is folly, a critical threat to computers-as-understandable/learnable-things, which is one of the most humble & basic virtues. Renaissance society & natural philosophy emerged from the roots of visibility, and turning back the clock & making computing unknowable again would degrade the spirit of mankind enormously.
I'm not saying this to hurt anyone's feelings. I think it's important feedback, and I think, if users see any noticeable percent of the web turned into a giant animated bitmap delivery engine, they'll be far more unreasonable about it. People are and were mad the core of Google Sheets turned into a giant bitmap.
As for the team specifically? Did they set out to ruin the world? Honestly I'm not really sure, because it seems like a pretty obvious thing to miss, what an extreme degradation this is. I suspect they just built new tech for native & were like, hey we can port this to the web, and the fact that it's a giant bitmap isn't really their problem, anything they actually really care about that much, since the technological possibility is just so enticing to them, given what they already had. They claim to support & cherish the web, but I can hardly think of a crueler act to perpetrate against the web than replacing the high-level information-rich view-source world with a bunch of bitmaps on the screen. If they do care about the actual web, the web of information, in my view they have good options & possibilities. Making a mixed mode renderer that uses DOM atop their canvas seems like a pretty obvious answer, to make the structure & text real, something more than just visual. But they'd have to refocus. They'd have to be willing to try, they'd have to find a less combatative position, one not so opposed to the DOM that makes up 99.9999999% of websites. If Flutter could use some actual HTML elements to do some of the work with, it'd be a redeemable road. It wouldn't be a bleak dark alley into hypertext oblivion. It wouldn't be that hard, but it'd require a pivot. I think the team can find the light, can make great things, but it requires some severe wake-up moments. I hope they can hear this feedback early, & understand how frustrated sad & miserable what they propose will make masses of people. I hope all of Google sees & understands what a threat Flutter team's current effort is against whatever goodwill is held by webizens everywhere towards Google at large.
This post of yours once again shows a need to snark, to be cruel. To tell yourself a story where you have been a saint and I am some awful person. You've denied fault again and again, and cast blame after blame on me as a person and almost never the ideas. This sort of shitthrowing is indeed less than what I would hope from this forum. I'm sorry that my language is not always up to your spec, Mr. Tone Police. I'm sorry I don't come only with fluffy cute animals & heart emojis & roses. I would like to be finding & surfacing the best things. But sometimes there are dangers too, and this is such a case. I have some very serious concerns about what is happening, and if this early technology starts to emerge into the world as so, it will cause enormous blowback against Google at large. Some of my language could be toned down. I am a bit cavalier sometimes, especially when the threat is so vast. But overall, if you look at most of my posts, I think most of them tend towards, maybe angry yes, but at least trying to communicate seriously, trying to talk about what the threat is, trying to protect all the users from harm, trying to keep some softness in software, & keep us all from being ramroaded into only ever being consigned to passive consumers of technology. I might be wrong, I could be mistaken, my stance could be off, but the set of concerns here are valid, and there are real virtues which are very important for all of us, at a deep deep level, and guide what parts of the future will be locked and unlocked to those who come next. I accept that I may have troubled some people by saying so, by being somewhat vulgar, but overall, I think I have been quite balanced about it.
How long until ART just gets replaced outright with Flutter?
Why was it easier to create an entirely new AOT, JIT, language, framework, etc than to fix Android instead?
> Flutter is also learning to get along better with the web. Previously, Flutter developers had to choose whether they wanted web builds to render with the HTML renderer – producing a combination of HTML elements, CSS, Canvas elements, and SVG elements – or with the CanvasKit renderer, which produces graphics rather than readable source code. Its latest trick is element embedding, which lets Flutter content be added to any web page within a <div> element. It thus becomes part of the Document Object Model (DOM) and can be manipulated using CSS selectors and transformations.
CanvasKit continues to terrify me as one of the utmost & highest existential threats to the web; instead of a hypertext engine it turns the web into a way to push pixels in people's faces, and the "canvas" mentality is an evil one.
So I'm not sure whether to be happy about the news here or more distressed. CanvasKit can seemingly now interoperate alongside the html+svg native renderer, rather than be all consuming. On the one hand, yay, folks are less likely to completely wreck the experience & build some purely forsaken Flash like anti-web hell. But now it may be easier to mix little Flash-isms in, little daubs of anti-web, and god-forbid that give CanvasKit enough wiggle room to start making it in the door.
> "Historically, people built for the web using the Document Object Model and HTML," explained Sneath. "And that was kind of the only way to build web apps. Now, over the last couple of years, between Canvas and WebAssembly, we've got these new technologies that enable a different class of web app experience. And so Flutter is unapologetically aiming at that next-generation class."
Very sad to hear such a strongly anti-web, chest-thumping, perspective so prominently featured. This isn't a different class of web app; if you abandon the DOM you strip away user-agency, you blow up user-extensions, you wreck all the accessibility tools, then you've reduced the web to an app delivery platform. The "next-generation class" sounds like "we use the web as an app delivery platform". It sounds ok for developers, terrible for everyone else.
> We're aiming at this next class of apps that look very much like the kinds of apps that Flutter is designed to solve – high graphical fidelity, offering pixel level of control over apps, having a canvas where you can draw and manage every part of the environment yourself." ®
Canvas just isn't very web. It's not malleabe, it's not flexible. Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sounds like a worse betrayal of the web than last time, like a worse deal for users.
This idea that user-agency is irrelevant, that hypermedia & exchange of information is not on the radar at all, the maximalist view that pushing pixels in people's faces is the only thing that matters continues to strike me as anti-human, as destructive & detrimental to humankind, for some very top-down-control oriented short-term wins. It's poisoning what we might build, to enable a very narrow clade of people to dictate to the world what we can ever do. Seeing the ethos so strongly said is a revolting thing to keep seeing, & it's said with such obvious lack of concern for the user. I really wish someone would reel these spokespeople in a bit, & have some balance, show some respect for user-agency, but the whole project feels like a bank against that, caring only for appdev. This is why I always thought webdev was so good: it permitted the whole world to also be stakeholders, where-as apps have always been too afraid to negotiate control.
Anyhow... while Fuchsia is getting a lot of coverage as a part of the recent layouts, it's remarkable how wildly high-profile the efforts here in Flutter are. Building a new rendering engine, Flutter? Wow. The Skia rendering engine has, so far, been the one Google-ism in the stack that has been uncontested, untouched, uncompeted with, and now there's competition.
I think I've seen your comments before about this topic, both here and perhaps on Reddit, but definitely on Slack (I think I talked with you there but it seems you were kicked out of that Slack group for whatever reason). While I do like the DOM, I don't think anyone is "viewing source" of web apps, and other platforms like desktop or mobile don't have that viewability either, not even to their detriment, so I feel that the canvas-ification of the web is nothing new or major, it simply will become as those other platforms are.
The web as it exists today is not sacrosanct (but it seems like you think it so), if I can get better performance out of WASM, canvas and generally eschewing the DOM, I will use that solution. Your comments are much more vehement than they need to be, IMO, like "anti-human?" It's just a browser, chill out [0]. Seems some your other comments are similarly vehement and vitriolic beyond the proportion of the topic you talk about in each one.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Telling me to "chill out" and belittling my belief that the web is distinct does not demonstrate good faith on your part. I'd be happy to discuss why I think abandoning the web & hypertext as a common interchange is anti-human & beastly, but you don't seem interested in discussion or exploration. You've spent your time tearing me down & spreading casual sleight & disdain for the only successful online connected information space humanity has made.
I don't feel like any kind of conversation here is possible. You have soundly refused to entertain the idea that perhaps the web has value or is distinct or improved over apps. You seem to only value apps & see nothing wrong with supplanting a rich connected standards-based information space with a bunch of pixels being shoved in people's faces. That's your perogative I guess, but if we aren't willing to see the other's values there's not much discussion really possible.
I stand by my stance that throwing away interoperable information standards like html is anti-human. I continue to find the web to be far above everything else, far more adaptable & flexible than any other computing medium. You out of hand reject view source, but to me, it is an alive & powerful capability, that lets us explore, extend, & adapt these amazing online systems we run across. There is a huge wide ecosystem of web extensions, that people seem to care quite a lot about based on the many discussions happening here on HN, based on download count, and what Flutter is proposing is an extreme existential threat to that user-agency, which is powered 100% by the "view-source" capability you have given not the smallest iota of respect to, have said is worthless. I'm not sure how, given the evidence provided by the countless extensions people use and love, you could claim something so callous & make such belittling remarks.
I've tutored a number of newcombers to computer science & programming via some web scripting, modifying the online experiences they were already having, by asking them for something about a site that annoys them, and then building a userscript to improve or address; it's a problem-oriented way to understand programming & the web medium. This has enormous value, is a pro-human engagement that the web shines at & makes possible; it's instantly gratifying to see we can work with the computer, work with what is, shape it. There is, for example, https://malleable.systems , dedicated to this virtue of modifyability. Where-as in apps the kind of cruel cold hard "pixel perfect precision" & top-down ownership-by-corporation is the anti-human basis most work is executed under. To me, this is a sucking void of value, a bleak sad world, far less than the interoperable places of information we ought have, and a massive step back.
From your current stance, there doesn't seem to be any possibility you might be willing to consider any of the virtues I think are important. You've picked a very narrow set of values you will recognize, and disregarded outside principles & values. I'm not sure how we can converse about this & make progress, given that you won't permit nor acknowledge any of my values or beliefs, give no credence to web extensions nor systems with viewable source. I have at least recognized some of the expedience, the desires of app developers to have their control & speed; I just think it must be a complement to other things, & not total. Your views have totally rejected the web, for what feels to me like a largely egocentric set of values/priorities. I just wish this platform would not be on the web, if it has such savage abandon in disregarding the interoperable base values & virtues that have, so far, defined the web. Flutter is standing up to be the next anti-inter-operable Flash, it's own weird corporate-controlled antii-user penitentiary within the web, and that is for sure a horror & damaging.
(I do not believe I have ever been on the slack? My password manager does not have any such logins nor do I recall joining.)
My "chill out" comment was not related to your thoughts on the DOM, it was due to your use of very extreme language to explain things that did not seem to merit such extremity. I linked "anti-human" above but I was able to find multitudinous other comments with words like "repulsive," "reprehensible," "cruel," "shitty," and so on. Your comment history seems filled with vitriol, and it is why I made such a comment. This is probably why your Twitter account is now suspended, on which I used to talk to you before but it appears not recently. It was a DC Tech Slack if I recall correctly by the way, you had some extreme opinions there too and used the same vitriolic language that then got you kicked out. It seems like the same pattern persists, where you were using the words above but then people got sick of it and then you tried to argue that you were commenting in good faith, or that others weren't (even though they perfectly were).
Personally, I agree with you on the role of the DOM, but again, I do not see it as religiously as you do, in my view it is just a technology. I like to read content, sure, and that's where I see the value of the DOM. I also use quite a lot of browser extensions and would not like them to go away, such as adblockers. I don't see them going away though, the DOM is simply too entrenched for content.
However, at the same time, I like fast and rich applications. I do not like using Electron, which is part of the very same web technology you so like. I would rather not have to pull up a browser for every single app I use. Wasting pointless CPU cycles and gigabytes of RAM, now that is anti-human, not to mention anti-Earth, since they consume more electricity and give off more greenhouse gas emissions by doing so, simply to interpret Javascript in a virtual machine. That is why I like stuff like Flutter. I don't particularly care that users can't modify it, because, again, as an app, there is nothing you necessarily need to modify, and on mobile and desktop anyways, people can't "inspect element" and change things. It provides me with a fast, unified programming interface on which I can build apps. You can still have interoperability with stuff like that, such as Mastodon which uses federation, even though users again can't directly modify the source code, at least on their mobile apps.
Your opinion is fine, liminally. I even agree with parts of it. It becomes quite annoying to hear though when it becomes almost religious in the nature of your belief, where for those you disagree, you start spewing vitriol instead. It is especially grating when you are there on almost every Flutter thread on HN, and elsewhere. If you really want people to discuss with you in good faith, I recommend you stop using words like "cruel," "repulsive," "repugnant," "vile" and so on. People can smell the salt a mile away.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31636307#31642018
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32654358#32656825
The web is the only "good" tech we share, & this is a cruel & ruinous way to reimpose a repugnant Flash back on the world.
Thank you for making an effort to acknowledge some other sides of the issue. I am sympathetic to anti-Electron views. To me it's ridiculous we have Electron. The web should have better answers so that the secure multi-tenant virtual machine we have (the actual browser) can be re-used. But PWAs are still too limited/conservative, the platform growth kept so slow & with too few parallel efforts/implementers, & we lack any kind of sidecar of system-capabilities to extend them with just-enough systems capabilities (like Electron gives us). So we have the terrible cost of redistributing/reinstantiating the entire virtual machine, a sad waste. There's room for other efforts beyond this (ex: Tauri). But this is just one struggle. Overall the web platform is not to blame for most crimes attributed to it; native apps with massive ad networks & telemetry are also slow & many are bloated (with worse start times by far), & going the other way, webapps like vscode prove amazing super-fast full-featured apps are possible. Neither the web nor native can guard against bad app architecture. But seeing the web taken over by Flash again is a great technosocial regression, a massive injury to ourselves that is indeed vile. We need more principled path to improvement, something that maintains the core distinct advantage of the web medium, not paves it over (as your mobile & desktop excuse does). The excuse that there are some bad webapps in existence doesn't cut it for me, isn't the totalizing proof it's made out to be, to justify smashing it, especially give how many slick smooth counter-examples abound.
Last, I really really really do not appreciate your social muckraking/stalking. These incidents still hurt me, still leave me feeling left flat. Should I have told Twitter Never Trumpers they are just as bad and to get in the sea? Meh, maybe not? (Im still unclear whether I have real remorse on replying with that fatal comment.) Did I overreact when someone posted a shit ton of guns into our DC Tech Slack channels, when they reacted fliply & without visible reprise when others asked them to stop or show respect, over numerous hours? Yes, I did overreact, wasnt as metered as I ought have been. But that ban & most of the other brow-beatings I got from one particular mod on DC Tech slack & from no-one else feel completely out of whack & absurdly lopsided time & time again. It feels impossible to survive these networks, to me, that, over decades of posting some beef or dustup will cause heck & some day I (and many other active participants) just wont emerge out from whatever mod is calling the shots that day. Good behavior is good for nothing to my name, earns no credit. And I put in so much assistance faith trust optimism & belief everywhere I go anyways, because I am motivated by a strong belief, by hope for technology, by hope we can all get better together. Mods remember only the bad & strikes are never forgiven. This is a cruel & uncaring system, one my protests against have only brought trouble down on me for.
In general, fuck off. Fuck you for personally dragging on me, over this beaten complex old history of mine. That's extremely low life mean shit thing to do, over something you know not fucking at all. I burst with enthusiasm & positivity & people were shocked & stunned when I got banned from DC Tech Slack, because I was a helper, a good participant. I think not but maybe I do deserve all these bad things and maybe I am as awful & horrible as you would make me out to be. But I believe if not in the execution at least in basic good & dignity of almost every single strike or ban I've gotten anywhere, and it sucks enormously having a decade of connection ripped away with no recourse offered. Having you track my faults across decades & come to spit in my face & cancel me with vagaries, to score some points against me on this one topic, is an unjust misdeed of much much lower character & decency than anything I have ever gotten banned for. You call me to task as an overexaggerator, a crier of wolf, a disruptor of the public for my harsh words, yet your actions against me contain real intent to harm & cause damage, have acted with cruelty & personal animosity. Lay off your scrooging me; regardless of how my words "quite annoy" you and how frustrating it is being exposed to another's belief, to a care that you happen to disagree with. Smell & see your own salt.
Do I regret demonizing this tech? Currently no. There is a need for alarm, a clear & present danger & need to call attention to great harm, that I think the path it has makes it insidiously hard to notice the downside of, to recognize in time for what it is. I wont apologize for pointing out the toxic dangers here, dont see what options I have to deescalate my alarm over this topic. I will try to focus more on the positive, to spend more time raising up what is good, what it is that is worth believing in. But there is still an enormously dangerous cliff we ride the cusp of here, where users end up with nothing, no agency at all, interoperability ends, and that is anti-human, that is a terrible terrible plight.
It's not like I follow all of your social media movements, I just see you a lot on specific types of threads on HN and other places like that Slack, and I just remembered that incident, that's it.
However, words have consequences. You posted in public fora and I am free to comment on the patterns I see there. If you feel offended (and feel "cruel and personal animosity") by me pointing out your own words and how those words make other people feel (enough to ban in you in several places, it looks like), then that's really on you, to be honest. I linked a few places where other people feel the same way, and you know what they say about common denominators.
> by me pointing out your own words
You shared two links. One of them is slightly over the top & impolite as you say, but it's hardly worth hiding your children over & running-me-out over. The other seems totally fine? Also, hugely humorously to me, it results in the "defender" calling this a new Flash & saying that's ok! I found that hilarious. Thanks for reminding me.
But I also found 22 other links, on HN alone, and there's probably some more. Few have anything like the dangerous impoliteness you want me ran-off for. I think I could probably find slightly less polite things to say if I wanted to. It's easy to highlight some conveniently polarizing words, but in context, I think it's pretty clear & understandable where I'm coming from.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=rektide%20canvaskit&sort=byDat...
> and how those words make other people feel (enough to ban in you in several places, it looks like)
First: you did not post these words. Not in the least. If you had, we might have something to discuss & debate & I would not be as presently mad as I have been for the past 24 hours. You just alluded so there having been some kind of words, once, and invent a a deeply negative portrayal of me suitable to your mean-spirited heartless task of casting me aside, that has nothing to do with reality. It has nothing to do with other people's feelings & how I made people feel. It just has to do with your little petty crusade, to make me look bad, to injure me.
You bullied & browbeat me over some vague incident you don't really know or understand, cruelly. I responded the first time with generous sincerity far beyond what your ignorant snub deserved, & talked through the pain & difficulty surrounding these issues, & their complexity. I put some kind of substance to the completely empty airless taunting accusations you made.
And you turned right back around & used the same mean, small, petty, short & trite baseless form to reduce me, ignoring the only iota of substances we had in this discussion to once again make diffuse meanspirited & cruel accusation, entirely without substance or merit.
These words you've written this time just double down on showing your character, showing the caliber of character you bring. I know what I have been defending, I know what principles & virtues have motivated me in talking about CanvasKit (and have been quite transparent about my position, across many years now), but I keep grasping to understand what motivates you so deeply to act so small & so pettily to someone, to resort so heavily to attacks on my character, of which you know so little?
Two links out of many, I just did not want or need to link all of them. Regardless, the irony is quite thick. You seem offended by my words, as you mentioned, yet in the same breath don't seem to comprehend that your own words might have made other people feel a similar level of offense as you now feel. It really does feel like a "rules for me and not for thee". Do you really not see the irony of this fact?
Anyway, HN is not the forum for these types of squabbles. I've noticed your comments for a long time and just now did I point them out. I will not need to point them out further, I suppose.
> You seem offended by my words, as you mentioned, yet in the same breath don't seem to comprehend that your own words might have made other people feel a similar level of offense as you now feel.
You targeted your words against a person. You went out of your way to invent malicious stories to tell, twisting some stalkerish facts you had at your disposal to suit your narrative without having any real sense of what happened. Then showing not the smallest iota of remorse or emapthy, you doubled down on your shitty low-grade deliberately-cruel deceit when some actual facts were injected we could have discussed.
I targeted my grievances against ideas, against actual real harm being done to computing & to users.
Yet you continue with unbecoming nasty backhanding retorts, once again using insults & being derogatory to try to claim the upper hand:
> Regardless, the irony is quite thick.
Is it? Really?
I have said again and again that turning the web into a giant display of bitmaps is extremely bad for society. Like, destructive of the most critical fundamental gain information-society has ever had. Turning back the only semi-fair-shake the users of the world have gotten in computing, getting some bit of computing that has a common understandable modifiable substrate, whence upon extensions & a host of user-agencies have been built. Ruining that is folly, a critical threat to computers-as-understandable/learnable-things, which is one of the most humble & basic virtues. Renaissance society & natural philosophy emerged from the roots of visibility, and turning back the clock & making computing unknowable again would degrade the spirit of mankind enormously.
I'm not saying this to hurt anyone's feelings. I think it's important feedback, and I think, if users see any noticeable percent of the web turned into a giant animated bitmap delivery engine, they'll be far more unreasonable about it. People are and were mad the core of Google Sheets turned into a giant bitmap.
As for the team specifically? Did they set out to ruin the world? Honestly I'm not really sure, because it seems like a pretty obvious thing to miss, what an extreme degradation this is. I suspect they just built new tech for native & were like, hey we can port this to the web, and the fact that it's a giant bitmap isn't really their problem, anything they actually really care about that much, since the technological possibility is just so enticing to them, given what they already had. They claim to support & cherish the web, but I can hardly think of a crueler act to perpetrate against the web than replacing the high-level information-rich view-source world with a bunch of bitmaps on the screen. If they do care about the actual web, the web of information, in my view they have good options & possibilities. Making a mixed mode renderer that uses DOM atop their canvas seems like a pretty obvious answer, to make the structure & text real, something more than just visual. But they'd have to refocus. They'd have to be willing to try, they'd have to find a less combatative position, one not so opposed to the DOM that makes up 99.9999999% of websites. If Flutter could use some actual HTML elements to do some of the work with, it'd be a redeemable road. It wouldn't be a bleak dark alley into hypertext oblivion. It wouldn't be that hard, but it'd require a pivot. I think the team can find the light, can make great things, but it requires some severe wake-up moments. I hope they can hear this feedback early, & understand how frustrated sad & miserable what they propose will make masses of people. I hope all of Google sees & understands what a threat Flutter team's current effort is against whatever goodwill is held by webizens everywhere towards Google at large.
This post of yours once again shows a need to snark, to be cruel. To tell yourself a story where you have been a saint and I am some awful person. You've denied fault again and again, and cast blame after blame on me as a person and almost never the ideas. This sort of shitthrowing is indeed less than what I would hope from this forum. I'm sorry that my language is not always up to your spec, Mr. Tone Police. I'm sorry I don't come only with fluffy cute animals & heart emojis & roses. I would like to be finding & surfacing the best things. But sometimes there are dangers too, and this is such a case. I have some very serious concerns about what is happening, and if this early technology starts to emerge into the world as so, it will cause enormous blowback against Google at large. Some of my language could be toned down. I am a bit cavalier sometimes, especially when the threat is so vast. But overall, if you look at most of my posts, I think most of them tend towards, maybe angry yes, but at least trying to communicate seriously, trying to talk about what the threat is, trying to protect all the users from harm, trying to keep some softness in software, & keep us all from being ramroaded into only ever being consigned to passive consumers of technology. I might be wrong, I could be mistaken, my stance could be off, but the set of concerns here are valid, and there are real virtues which are very important for all of us, at a deep deep level, and guide what parts of the future will be locked and unlocked to those who come next. I accept that I may have troubled some people by saying so, by being somewhat vulgar, but overall, I think I have been quite balanced about it.