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Comment by piker

2 days ago

It’s a great point. This uses the canvas element only because it’s rendering in the browser. But this is really a desktop application, so the canvas element doesn't come up as a concept outside of WASM. Your main contention seems to be that nobody other than web browser implementers can render and edit text, and thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’s shaping and layout engines.

There are issues solved by the DOM for sure, but it requires shipping an entire web browser, and this product is a dedicated word processor. I’d rather face those issues head-on than defer to someone else’s implementation of such a core aspect. I know IME is broken, and Tritium’s really only able to address the needs of the happy path at the moment, but if can do that well, then there’s a business model to fund solving the edge cases to bring a real Word competitor to the desktop for lawyers.

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piker

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miki123211  1 day ago

> thus we should be limited to the set of applications that can run on the DOM and leverage the web browser’s shaping and layout engines.

Yes, if you want to run in the web browser, use the APIs the browser gives you. If you want to go wild, run directly on desktop OSes.

Web browsers just straight up don't have some of the APIs you will need for a working app. Accessibility is a major example. If you want to stay compliant with legislation (probably something to care about when selling to lawyers), you'll end up poorly re-implementing an inferrior version of your GUI framework as a DOM tree for accessibility.

Sometimes your use case is just so uncommon and esoteric that's genuinely what you need to do (see Google Docs), but keep in mind that it requires Google-like levels of engineering investments to do it at least somewhat well.

  • piker  1 day ago

    Very true! That's why this is just a "web preview". It's not intended to be used as the primary application. As mentioned elsewhere, the primary application is a desktop application that does look to leverage native APIs that aren't available on the web.

cryptonector  1 day ago

> Your main contention seems to be that nobody other than web browser implementers can render and edit text,

I took it as a claim that using the canvas you can't implement _inputs_ correctly. The example given was about compose sequences, but I'm sure there's much more to it.

  • hitekker  1 day ago

    Yeah the GP’s reply was a little misleading/ambiguous. It begins by saying “great point” but then it distorts & argues against that point.

    Better just to disagree directly, I think.

gwbas1c  1 day ago

I for one appreciate the "no html" approach.

That being said, if this is truly a desktop application, why waste time making it run in a browser? If the point is to have a preview, put the time into making some good short videos that can go into a preview page.

  • piker  1 day ago

    Because it's cool to get your hands on something before diving in. Also it allows users in walled off corporate environments to preview it without having to jump through thousands of hours of infosec hurdles.

  • connicpu  1 day ago

    Considering it's just the desktop application being rendered to a canvas, I imagine not a ton of effort even needed to be put in and the UI framework is handling most of it.

wiseowise  1 day ago

> but it requires shipping an entire web browser

That’s a moot point and completely irrelevant for 99.99% people.

  • piker  1 day ago

    Perhaps that is an accurate percentage, but lawyers are in that .01%. If you're competing with Microsoft Word on performance you'd better be stupid fast and lightweight. Transactional lawyers routinely have dozens of Word documents and PDFs open at a time. Not long-term viable with something like Electron.