From: Timmy Douglas <mail@timmydouglas.com>
To: Amirouche <amirouche@hyper.dev>
Cc: ~sircmpwn/public-inbox@lists.sr.ht
Subject: Re: electron alternatives: wayland-like widget toolkits/GUI frameworks
In-Reply-To: <7f1dd619d56936818a7e466da3409b72@hyper.dev>
References: <871rd7icvp.fsf@timmydouglas.com>
 <7f1dd619d56936818a7e466da3409b72@hyper.dev>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2021 19:56:17 -0800
Message-ID: <87r1l6i0f2.fsf@timmydouglas.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain

Amirouche <amirouche@hyper.dev> writes:

> On 2021-02-23 06:14, Timmy Douglas wrote:
>> 1. Has anyone created a realistic alternative to HTML/CSS--maybe a
>> binary DOM that has a reasonable API for manipulation? I supposed it'd
>> also need some sort of rendering engine
>> 
>
> By DOM, you mean the HTML serialization or the tree-like structure that 
> is in memory?

well it'd probably be both--you'd need some sort of serialization format
(HTML today) to materialize the one you actually operate on. But if you
were going to create a GUI toolkit around it, you probably wouldn't want
to spend time parsing HTML unless you made that choice to reuse other code.

> I think HTML/CSS even DOM API are nice, but it is a long way to get 
> there.
> And not a lot of people have the time or energy to dive into 
> alternatives approaches.
>
> GUI without HTML/CSS is more powerful than what the browser can do. I 
> figured that while trying to build a text editor.

If I was going to build a simple text editor, I think rendering the view
with HTML/a couple of absolute-positioned preformatted divs would be
easier than writing my own renderer on a canvas-like object, if that
makes sense.