[BystanderX]

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.

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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)

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> 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)

[Hixie]

I mean, I try to use Devtools on other sites, but I haven't really had any real success with that for years. I don't know how many of the rest of the web's ~4 billion users try to use DevTools but I can't imagine it's anything close to a majority. Or even a large minority.

FWIW Flutter isn't trying to replace the web. We're trying to offer a way of writing web apps that aren't really possible today. For example, something like the Flutter Folio demo, which works on multiple platforms including web, was written in a few weeks. I cannot fathom how I would do that without Flutter.