google docs reimplemented their whole UX in canvas, and this is a giant company that controls browser standards as much as anyone does. can't think of a louder way to admit defeat re advanced text entry on the web
I wonder about unbundling the different pieces of the browser. Sandboxing + safe-ish remotely-managed code is really cool. Zero-install apps is cool-ish, but comes with slow loading (try opening a new tab in gmail on my poor linux firefox).
But for UX things are tricky. The DOM is somehow simultaneously the best widgets library and a horrible widgets library. CSS isn't quite powerful enough, hence all the scroll jank tricks many sites are still doing, hence the difficulty of mixing classes and getting sane results.
I'd want a browser-like execution context, but with something more like JSX than the DOM, pluggable layout engines with the default one more like modern constraints languages than CSS, SPA-aware RPC primitives, and more attention paid to the customizability of text entry and scroll.
Electron IDEs are simultaneously great (so powerful and customizable) and really bad (built on the worst text entry tech you could pick).
the author is 99% right about the difficult of interacting with custom controls, possible exception of companies like shopify and stripe that have put massive investment into getting this stuff to work cross-platform.
To be fair Google Docs is a bit different here. To a large extent their goal is to display what is going to be printed (this is changing a bit with the new pageless mode and things like checkboxes but still is the core). So doing all of the rendering themselves actually makes sense.
That being said I would love to see a rich-text input with some default controls available.
I wonder about unbundling the different pieces of the browser. Sandboxing + safe-ish remotely-managed code is really cool. Zero-install apps is cool-ish, but comes with slow loading (try opening a new tab in gmail on my poor linux firefox).
But for UX things are tricky. The DOM is somehow simultaneously the best widgets library and a horrible widgets library. CSS isn't quite powerful enough, hence all the scroll jank tricks many sites are still doing, hence the difficulty of mixing classes and getting sane results.
I'd want a browser-like execution context, but with something more like JSX than the DOM, pluggable layout engines with the default one more like modern constraints languages than CSS, SPA-aware RPC primitives, and more attention paid to the customizability of text entry and scroll.
Electron IDEs are simultaneously great (so powerful and customizable) and really bad (built on the worst text entry tech you could pick).
the author is 99% right about the difficult of interacting with custom controls, possible exception of companies like shopify and stripe that have put massive investment into getting this stuff to work cross-platform.