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Show HN: UI system completely painted on HTML5 Canvas (early demo)

6 points| nadam | 14 years ago |codeclamp.com | reply

15 comments

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[+] ricardobeat|14 years ago|reply
IMO this is interesting as a technical exercise, and stops there.

    Its dynamic layout, dynamic stylesheets, customizable
    painting and conceptual simplicity beats modern
    desktop/plugin/platform-locked technologies
That sounds like HTML+CSS+JS.

Bitmap drawing is nothing new. What are the expected advantages of creating a whole new renderer, graphics library, and UI kit inside an enviroment that already offers essentially the same?

[+] voidr|14 years ago|reply
I wouldn't call this approach radically new, this was already done with GTK3:

http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2010/11/23/gtk3-vs-html5/

Also we already have a lot of browser UI toolkits that behave the same in modern browsers. I don't really feel this could bring anything new to the table.

A lot of the time in fact we don't want our UI to look the same everywhere, for example I would love my site to scale down and degrade gracefully on mobile or in other words: progressive enhancement.

Performance and legacy browsers still plague the canvas element, so I won't rely on that as the foundation of a UI technology.

And last but not least: this UI framework has to duplicate a lot of behavior that the browser already does, which I feel is both a waste of time and a waste of resources.

I don't want to look too negative about this, but I'm really skeptical that a UI framework like this would be better than what we already have.

[+] nadam|14 years ago|reply
This is my latest startup. The current version (0.1) is a very early version, it is not intended for production usage yet. I am interested in opinions on the approach, and also would be happy to find investors.
[+] tomaskafka|14 years ago|reply
Sorry man, this just goes against the grain of the web - the future is imo in using browser as a smart, hw accelerated runtime that is native on every platform, not in creating a dumb/slow proprietary emulation layer inside. Flash has already lost, and whatever good it had (fast accelerated video) has already been made native.
[+] teyc|14 years ago|reply
Interesting.

In the long run, I believe this is the wrong approach. Scenegraph-based UI can be easier to HW accelerate.

[+] Enterprize1|14 years ago|reply
I smell a new flash coming. No accessibility and it emulates things, that browser can do nativly, without using JavaScript.
[+] nadam|14 years ago|reply
If we call this 'flash': My dream is to create a better flash than flash. I do this in my spare time, so the features a I've put into this are very limited as of yet, but once I will have more time/resources I will try to do my best on things like accessibility.
[+] garethsprice|14 years ago|reply
Firefox 8.0.1: Click on the demo app area, everything disappears.
[+] nadam|14 years ago|reply
Thanks for the bug report. I've tested on Firefox 8.0.1 on Windows 7, it works here. Maybe it behaves differently on different operating systems?