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So this is already a pretty toasty section of comments so let me put this to you. If you've already answered this elsewhere, please let me know.

I would be surprised if someone heavily involved in the Web's development process for a long time didn't have some really sore spots about it.

That aside:

What do you think of the loss of opportunities for learning and customization that moving to an opaque system running "in" the web (flutter) implies?

How did you get into the Web? Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

Have you gotten value from the ability to quickly use others' extensions of useragent behavior that seem highly unlikely to work with this approach? Or will they be able to?

Fairly loaded questions I guess, but realistic ones too, not just philosophical.

discuss

munificent|5 years ago

> Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

I got into web design/programming in the 90s, and the answer is basically no. Sure you could poke around a bit, but I never found it to be a revelation. I still had to buy books, read blogs, and do a ton of trial and error. Also, it was a never-ending game of trying to testing to see what each new browser release added or broke.

We are in infinitely better position today thanks to open source. The "View Source" of today is GitHub. Want to write a high-performance dynamically typed language VM? Here: https://github.com/v8/v8 Build an operating system? OK: https://github.com/torvalds/linux Build a database? Here you go: https://github.com/postgres/postgres

Hixie|5 years ago

> What do you think of the loss of opportunities for learning and customization that moving to an opaque system running "in" the web (flutter) implies?

Not sure what you really mean. If you mean the loss of "View Source" then I think we lost that a long time ago for anything but the most trivial of pages.

I used to say that view source was why the web was successful, and maybe it did help at the start, but I think we sailed past the point where view source stopped being useful years ago. Everything now is minified, and sites are too complicated for anyone to pick out what's going on from the original source let alone the actual served source...

> How did you get into the Web? Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

I'm a weird case, I got into the web by reading the standards. (Then I got annoyed the browsers didn't follow them, so I got into browser QA. Then I got annoyed that the standards weren't clear enough to allow test cases to be written, and I started editing the specs.)

> Have you gotten value from the ability to quickly use others' extensions of useragent behavior that seem highly unlikely to work with this approach? Or will they be able to?

I have not. A lot of people do like extensions though.

Other platforms have managed to get concepts like extensions, e.g. on Linux (well, X really) I can replace my window manager, on Windows I can install DLLs that add features to Windows Explorer, on Android the "share" button can share to a list of applications, etc. There's lots of examples.

BystanderX|5 years ago

Thanks for your reply.

> Not sure what you really mean. [...] sites are too complicated for anyone to pick out what's going on from the original source let alone the actual served source...

I agree, View Source itself has become less and less useful. The Devtools in most browsers have kept up fairly well though. They provide a lot of methods to understand, debug, and modify behavior of whatever you're running using HTML/CSS/JS, even if not perfect.

Perhaps if Flutter became mainstream enough that there's theoretically nothing stopping this from eventually happening for it as well. That's an interesting thought.

I suppose that leaves my last question, and it leans away from what might be a practical view from your position: Do you think flutter pushing for major market share while also trying to replace the core part of the web (HTML/CSS/JS -> Canvas renderer/wasm) is a good thing for the web's health and future?

(That's a good bit more philosophical, but I hope in #CURRENTYEAR we're starting to see value asking long-term questions like that, especially from inside of the giant companies. I'll stick to one of those kinds of questions)

> I'm a weird case, I got into the web by reading the standards. (Then I got annoyed the browsers didn't follow them, so I got into browser QA. Then I got annoyed that the standards weren't clear enough to allow test cases to be written, and I started editing the specs.)

That is interesting, thanks for sharing that.

> I have not. A lot of people do like extensions though.

Also interesting, fair enough.

> Other platforms have managed to get concepts like extensions, e.g. on Linux (well, X really) I can replace my window manager, on Windows I can install DLLs that add features to Windows Explorer, on Android the "share" button can share to a list of applications, etc. There's lots of examples.

Perhaps a good new question is what kind of tooling is available or planned for users to interact with Flutter applications? Such as what Devtools provide, or an expansion to them directly.

As a developer, the Devtools are absolutely critical to my workflow and ability to learn from and often fix issues I have with other sites.

(It could be pointed out that native applications don't tend to have that functionality, so it shouldn't be expected.. but in this context we're talking about effectively removing it from the Web, which does)