Ian Hickson stepped down a few years ago and has started working on Flutter instead (Flutter started as a "what would a browser look like if we removed a bunch of legacy from the HTML spec" project).
It's now maintained by Dominic Denicola, Anne van Kesteren, Tentek Celik, and a few others.
I think the TL for Flutter is no spring chicken, he did an interesting post the other day, talks about what other languages they looked at when they decided to move on from Javascript.
"Flutter was started by engineers from the Chrome team, and myself (who worked in the open source team as editor of the HTML standard)."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19856079
Might be related: I recently joined a company using Flutter web and notices similar stuff. Yes, the software engineers are wondering: "Why do we reimplement browser stuff?" But the business ask for it and we don't hear complaints from the end user.
Though, Flutter Web has come a long ways recently, especially with the WASM work that's underway [1][2]. Flutter is very well positioned, I think, for web applications requiring a lot of interactivity and complex layouts--the DX is phenomenal. For static sites, it's very hard to beat a pure HTML/CSS/JS stack in terms of speed and optimization potential.
That being said, I think there's a good chance we'll see more work on Dart web frameworks going forward. Projects like Zap[3] and Jaspr[4] and doing great work in this area already. And it's safe to say we may see a Celest Web framework one day!
It's still in tech preview, so there are likely to be bugs on various browsers, but Flutter for web compiles to standards-compliant JS/DOM/HTML/CSS so should work in any compliant browser.
Flutter for Web is heavily reminiscent of Famous with its custom layout system and off-DOM rendering (or guessing DOM rendering support w/ CSS transforms of divs). To see, just view-source on the NYT demo.
Ah, that is enlightening, thank you. I knew he works for Flutter, but I know very little about Flutter and the standards it uses. That WebHID I hadn't heard of till this doc, so figures if this is a non-standard. More Google worrying power play then, similar to the web integrity bomb under the open web.
Yeah, especially in the last month. Searching for anything about Flutter Web basically only returns results about pure web, now. I love that they don't even consider their own framework to be an important keyword...
Flutter on web is basically unusable for anything that involves text or links. The browser has so much native functionality here that trying to reimplement it is futile.
It's now maintained by Dominic Denicola, Anne van Kesteren, Tentek Celik, and a few others.
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