> Flutter is also learning to get along better with the web. Previously, Flutter developers had to choose whether they wanted web builds to render with the HTML renderer – producing a combination of HTML elements, CSS, Canvas elements, and SVG elements – or with the CanvasKit renderer, which produces graphics rather than readable source code. Its latest trick is element embedding, which lets Flutter content be added to any web page within a <div> element. It thus becomes part of the Document Object Model (DOM) and can be manipulated using CSS selectors and transformations.

CanvasKit continues to terrify me as one of the utmost & highest existential threats to the web; instead of a hypertext engine it turns the web into a way to push pixels in people's faces, and the "canvas" mentality is an evil one.

So I'm not sure whether to be happy about the news here or more distressed. CanvasKit can seemingly now interoperate alongside the html+svg native renderer, rather than be all consuming. On the one hand, yay, folks are less likely to completely wreck the experience & build some purely forsaken Flash like anti-web hell. But now it may be easier to mix little Flash-isms in, little daubs of anti-web, and god-forbid that give CanvasKit enough wiggle room to start making it in the door.

> "Historically, people built for the web using the Document Object Model and HTML," explained Sneath. "And that was kind of the only way to build web apps. Now, over the last couple of years, between Canvas and WebAssembly, we've got these new technologies that enable a different class of web app experience. And so Flutter is unapologetically aiming at that next-generation class."

Very sad to hear such a strongly anti-web, chest-thumping, perspective so prominently featured. This isn't a different class of web app; if you abandon the DOM you strip away user-agency, you blow up user-extensions, you wreck all the accessibility tools, then you've reduced the web to an app delivery platform. The "next-generation class" sounds like "we use the web as an app delivery platform". It sounds ok for developers, terrible for everyone else.

> We're aiming at this next class of apps that look very much like the kinds of apps that Flutter is designed to solve – high graphical fidelity, offering pixel level of control over apps, having a canvas where you can draw and manage every part of the environment yourself." ®

Canvas just isn't very web. It's not malleabe, it's not flexible. Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sounds like a worse betrayal of the web than last time, like a worse deal for users.

This idea that user-agency is irrelevant, that hypermedia & exchange of information is not on the radar at all, the maximalist view that pushing pixels in people's faces is the only thing that matters continues to strike me as anti-human, as destructive & detrimental to humankind, for some very top-down-control oriented short-term wins. It's poisoning what we might build, to enable a very narrow clade of people to dictate to the world what we can ever do. Seeing the ethos so strongly said is a revolting thing to keep seeing, & it's said with such obvious lack of concern for the user. I really wish someone would reel these spokespeople in a bit, & have some balance, show some respect for user-agency, but the whole project feels like a bank against that, caring only for appdev. This is why I always thought webdev was so good: it permitted the whole world to also be stakeholders, where-as apps have always been too afraid to negotiate control.

Anyhow... while Fuchsia is getting a lot of coverage as a part of the recent layouts, it's remarkable how wildly high-profile the efforts here in Flutter are. Building a new rendering engine, Flutter? Wow. The Skia rendering engine has, so far, been the one Google-ism in the stack that has been uncontested, untouched, uncompeted with, and now there's competition.