alt Hacker NewsHot take alert
> When is WASM finally going to be able to touch the DOM?
Coming from a web background, and having transitioned to games / realtime 3D applications...
Fuck the DOM dude. The idea that programming your UI via not one but TWO DSLs, and a scripting language, is utter madness. In principal, it might sound good (something something separation of concerns, or whatever-the-fuck), but in reality you always end up with this tightly coupled garbage fire split across a pile of different files and languages. This is not the way.
We need to build better native UI libraries that just open up a WebGL context and draw shit to that. DearIMGUI can probably already do like 85% of what modern webapps do.
Anyways .. /rant
Replies
Preach. HTML and CSS are markup languages for creating documents. Using them for GUI applications is wild and obviously a bad idea.
Couldn't you implement something like HTMX in wasm then and still have locality-of-behavior by specifying the behavior as html attributes?
> DearIMGUI can probably already do like 85% of what modern webapps do
I’m with you. Main blocker I’ve seen to “just use ImGui for everything” (which I’d love to adopt), is if I run ImGui in WASM the keyboard doesn’t open on mobile. This seems possible in theory because egui does it.
Even though running ImGui on mobile via WASM isn’t the primary use case, inevitably the boss or someone is going to need to “just do a quick thing” and won’t be able to on mobile, and this seems to be a hard ceiling with no real escape hatch or workaround.
One of those scenarios where, if we have to use a totally different implementation (React or whatever) to handle this 1% edge case, we might as well just use that for the other 99%.
That's true. But without the DOM we also loose the browser native accessibility support and text interaction and so on.