This hits into that concept of what exactly the "web" is. Is it just a media transport system? Or is it something more than that. Of course, we could cite Tim Berners-Lee here or Roy Fielding in this discussion.
But at minimum, I think a lot of us are tired of the app-lification of the web and somewhat wish we could have a bit of the old.
I think some part of UI design degraded with the web, where there used to be a clearer distinction between "user data" and "app chrome" areas than there is today.
I'd also like if we could get back to selections of more complex data types at some point and not just treat everything as text. UI toolkits have all kinds of lists and treeviews to model selectable entities, whereas in the browser, there just a single huge wall of text for everything.
I do miss this on an almost daily basis and I have stopped paying for services that force me to use an app without offering a website.
The last instance of this was just a couple days ago when I could not copy a tracking number from an e-commerce app (to then paste it into the shipping company website) but at least this e-commerce company has a web UI so I could rely on that.
Oh and the other one that I miss almost daily is cmd-F / ctrl-F
For macOS is by screencap and selecting on preview, for phones in their respective “ai analysis views” usually long pressing the bottom.
I know it’s a silly flow when it could be selectable straight away, just pointing it out.
They're referring more to things like "you can't copy the text labeling the brush width field in Photoshop" (but you CAN copy the text out of that editable field). It's a part of app design people are extremely lazy with today, as you note.
In any sensibly designed desktop package tracking app that number would've been selectable or copy-able text, like how an email subject is in a desktop email app. (Thunderbird, say.)
(Interestingly, ctrl-f to find is one that many apps/OSes have now borrowed back, with the ability to "find" items in menus through a Help menu -> Search action.)
Good heavens. I boggled at this.
It's not every single day, but probably at least once a week I am frustrated by this, and have been since the rise of PC GUIs -- so, coming up on 35 years now. It was often doable on DOS-era PCs, especially if you had a mouse, or a multitasking environment like DESQview, or best of all, both.
I forgot what desktop application it was, but there was a time that I repeatedly needed to copy texts from a dialog, which didn't support text selection. It frustrated me so much, that I put together a script to do OCR on the dialog.
Supporting complex data types for copy & paste is good; but it is almost trivial to also support plain text copying as a fallback when it already supports copying of other mimetypes. The problem is that some UI has no support of copying in any format at all.
on macOS, anything that uses the OS text input box has emacs keybindings. Universal text editing bindings across the entire OS for all native apps. You lose that with electron, just like you lose a lot of the windows niceties the moment apps stop using win32 and start overriding with their own custom UI toolkits in the name of "branding."
It's part of the big reason computers started to be perceived as difficult to use, and it's not because of the various operating systems. It's because desktop apps stopped respecting the OS and the user, so instead of only needing to learn the operating system's conventions, which would apply to every app built for it, you now have to learn every individual app's quirks and conventions.
The web just continued to make it worse where now every app is it's own little special snowflake.
You've never had to type error code/message instead of copying&pasting? Or use search to jump to a specific settings section?
Don't know if that helps you particularly, but it is great when it works and little-known.
All the more annoying when such years-old fundamentals are broken in all the new "supposedly better" frameworks
I never "read" a desktop application, whereas that is mostly what I use a browser for. And if I can't properly interact with text on a website, then I would likely reach for something else.
Information-oriented desktop apps still do this - any good email client, for instance, should make it trivial to copy a subject line or "to"/"from" address even if it's in the UI chrome.
We were all worried about something like Spotify killing off open RSS feeds for them, but there's a growing number of people who have no idea what a podcast is because people are using the term for YouTube channels with full video and no RSS feed (video or audio) to match it. Sometimes language drift is good, but not when it's done on purpose to get rid of a free and open technology in favor of silos.
"Wherever you get your podcasts" only works as long as it's built on top of an open method of syndication.
I know there are strongly held opinions about this, but I for one see no reason why the "application web" can't peacefully coexist, and interlink with, the document web. In my opinion it therefore makes sense to allow for different models for the application web, ones that do not revolve around a document.
On the other hand, if we're just bashing on javascript being the lingua franca of the web, that's a train I'll happily board!
then forget that.
W3C already offers guides for accessibility and canvas. But no one who opts for canvas turns around and remembers to do their landmarks.
Not completely true. Flutter has been adding some accessibility for web canvas target. [1]
I think Avalonia is in in the make it work phase. Accessibility will probably be added in the make it right phase.
[1] https://docs.flutter.dev/ui/accessibility/web-accessibility
Accessibility Object Model:
https://wicg.github.io/aom/spec/
It's very slowly coming together, but it won't be rone for many years yet. Especially since what you want is Phase 3.
I want every app and every web page to be 100% navigable if I do not have a pointing device attached to my computer.
And I want this enforced by law, by large rich countries. Accessibility to people with disabilities would be a good way: if your product or service is not accessible to people who can't see, can't use a mouse, or can't use their hands at all, then you can't sell it.
I can't use your app, I'll use an LLM to read it!
WASM is just one of the platforms that Avalonia supports and so, if you run MAUI on Avalonia, you can run it on WASM.
If you do that though, it is going to be like rendering any other desktop GUI toolkit in WASM. It is not a web app. I mean, it is cool you can do it and MAUI in WASM is better than no web capability at all I guess. But you would never set out to create a web app in MAUI.
MAUI on Avalonia on WASM is really a modern replacement for Silverlight. And it will likely be about as popular.
The really cool thing is being able to target the Linux desktop finally. A lot of people will love that.
And, while MAUI was meant to use native controls on each platform, many people may prefer the Avalonia approach of having your app render the same everywhere.
I havent been in that space for a couple years now so maybe they have gotten better, but I doubt that. I appreciate the heroic efforts of the MAUI team, but I think its just the unfortunate reality.
I was intrigued before I read this. This stuff is a non-starter for me.
That's because MAUI is intended for mobile and desktop apps.
If you want to use .NET for front-end web SPA, you can use Blazor which will behave exactly like you asked.
1000% - as a dotnet developer with 20 years under my belt, I currently don't see the reasoning behind this. With modern browsers, CSS/JS/HTML does SO much, you just don't have XAML. I like XAML (conceptually), but there is JSX for similar functionality, and it is at least compiled into real HTML, not just a applet.
I felt the same with silverlight as well. Why do we keep trying to reinvent Flash? We already have a far superior C# Flash in Unity compiled for Web (kind of a joke, but also not).
We're betting on this over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus where we're building a cross-platform UI solution that enables you to do this by having a web-centric API (we are developing our own custom HTML/CSS renderer for native platforms).
I get the value in this and realize it's not for your polished -$500 ARPU consumer social apps, but man this is weird.
(Also if anyone who worked on it is here, it's crashing for me on OSX 26, Chrome 142.0.7444.135, if I run an animation and hit back as the animation finishes)
We got all the plugins back.
One issue the demos reveal is, it doesn't _feel_ like the web. That is, I can't hit Ctrl+F to find text on a page. I can't select text with my cursor. I can't copy the address of a hyperlink. On my phone, I can't hard press on an image and share it to others. Screen readers can't handle it. I can't press a shortcut key to make everything larger.
These all may seem pedantic, but they contribute to the feeling "this is not the real web."
This is the same problem with Java applets in the late '90s, Flash and Silverlight in the early 2000s. They are islands of richness within a web page, but those islands are, well, opaque to browsers, search engines, and virtually all web tooling.