Happy to admit it's a crazy idea, and it's not something that I would want to see as a usual way to built sites. But for small areas of web apps where compatibility is difficult it does make sense.
Google Docs used to be contenteditable based, but moved to a custom rendering engine. They are a large enough company to be able to invest in that. Small businesses aren't, and have to rely on content editable.
Ladybird as a contenteditable polyfill would help smaller teams, or single developers, achieve the same, while also building on the existing tooling and APIs for contenteditable.
Isn't this actually prove that creating desktop grate applications, like a graphical word processor form the late 90's & some colab backend, is still infeasible with web tech?
Doesn't it also prove that it's still easier and faster to create a proper app and GUI toolkit yourself and just render pixels to the screen (as all desktop GUI toolkits do these days) instead of fighting the browser tech idiosyncrasies, even a proper app and GUI stack isn't trivial in itself?
> Doesn't it also prove that it's still easier and faster to create a proper app and GUI toolkit yourself and just render pixels to the screen (as all desktop GUI toolkits do these days) instead of fighting the browser tech idiosyncrasies, even a proper app and GUI stack isn't trivial in itself?
jmo, but i think so as well....
tho i wonder what the performance/battery-life implications of everything doing that might be... perhaps you could have an 'libhtml' for static sites and documents, and different ones for more interactive apps etc
Maybe not exactly the same. But whatever could have been improved on that base in the last 15 years.
The point is: We had much saner tech. Now it's just complete craziness, and still you can't even build a word processor like the one that run on Windows 95. This says just everything about the state of web tech for application development. (And no, this tech is rotten from the roots, so you can't improve on it. It'll get only more crazy and shitty if you try further.)
Google Docs used to be contenteditable based, but moved to a custom rendering engine. They are a large enough company to be able to invest in that. Small businesses aren't, and have to rely on content editable.
Ladybird as a contenteditable polyfill would help smaller teams, or single developers, achieve the same, while also building on the existing tooling and APIs for contenteditable.