Web Based Qt Design Viewer
I got called out by a few of the maintainers back when Qt first started targeting WASM for criticizing their reliance on rendering binary blobs of pixels to a canvas instead of writing native components in HTML.<p>At the time, I was told that this was basically just a tech demo, and accessibility was actually the browsers&#x27; fault because there wasn&#x27;t a Javascript API, and that all of the touch controls were going to be fine, and implementing all of the browsers&#x27; input methods by themselves was actually better than messing with CSS, and everything would be fine if I was patient.<p>So now, checking in, I can see that scrolling still doesn&#x27;t work on my Mac, that the demos still aren&#x27;t responsive and completely ignore the window width, that I still don&#x27;t have any accessibility options, that keyboard shortcuts like `tab` still don&#x27;t work, that text still isn&#x27;t selectable or searchable, and that right-click is still broken.<p>For the cluster example[0] I&#x27;m downloading <i>30 MB!</i> of code to render just three gauge charts on a page that uses 14MB of RAM. CPU fans immediately spin up -- I&#x27;m plugged in, but I can only imagine what this demo would do to my battery life.<p>I&#x27;m very excited about WASM, and there are some communities doing some really exciting things you should check out. Rust is well on its way to being a first-class language on the web. .NET had some really interesting demos. .NET actually renders your components as HTML, so there&#x27;s potential you could use C#&#x2F;.NET for practical web development, and not just for a quick port of an existing app. There are people doing cool things here.<p>But I don&#x27;t think Qt is built for the web. The devs are trying to cram a square peg into a round hole, and I&#x27;m skeptical that their future efforts will be any better. My understanding is that even on native platforms, Qt does a lot of behind-the-scenes rendering computations that then gets painted out as a pixel array. If that&#x27;s true, that could explain their insistence on doing the same thing here, but... that doesn&#x27;t make it any better.<p>Don&#x27;t use a WASM compiler that spits its entire interface into a canvas as a pixel array. I&#x27;ve seen a few people call this Flash 2.0, and honestly I think that&#x27;s doing a disservice to Flash. Flash had better accessibility controls than this.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qt-webassembly.io&#x2F;designviewer&#x2F;#ClusterTutorial.qmlrc" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qt-webassembly.io&#x2F;designviewer&#x2F;#ClusterTutorial.qmlrc</a>