A clean start for the web (2020)
I think the web is mostly good the way it is and I don&#x27;t want to see it re-invented. In fact, I hate Flutter because it&#x27;s not &quot;webby&quot;. It renderers all content and controls using Canvas which means all there is on the page is pixels which means no accessibility since there is no standard structure (the DOM) to dig through to find the content.<p>You might say there will be solutions like ideas to augment the canvas with meta data about what&#x27;s in it but that IMO misses the point.<p>As a user I want to be in control of the data that&#x27;s on my machine. With a standard like HTML, it allows me, as a user, far FAR more control then a native app. I can use userstyle sheets. I can write and&#x2F;or install extensions that look through or manipulate the content. None of this is possible if all I get is a rectangle of pixels.<p>Translation and&#x2F;or Language learning extensions would never have happened on native platforms because it&#x27;s effectively impossible to peer into the app. Whereas it&#x27;s super easy to peer into HTML based apps.<p>So, I like that most webapps work via HTML. I also like, that unlike most native UI frameworks, HTML has tons of relatively easy solutions for handling the differences between mobile and desktop. I&#x27;ve made several sites and web apps and while there may be a learning curve it&#x27;s 2-3 orders of magnitude less work to get something working everywhere (desktop&#x2F;tablet&#x2F;mobile) with HTML than any other way of doing it.<p>Change to 2 modes, document mode, and app mode doesn&#x27;t make sense to me. It&#x27;d be a net negative. People who want this I think want to take control away from the user. That&#x27;s clearly Flutter&#x27;s goal. All that canvas rendering means it&#x27;s harder to select text, harder to copy and paste, impossible to augment via extension. It puts all the control in the app dev&#x27;s hands and none in the user&#x27;s.<p>So no, I don&#x27;t want the web to be reinvented. Its provides something amazing that pretty much all attempts to replace it seems to missing. Its structure is a plus not a minus.