Websites today, including the one you are using now, are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. You probably read that and think to yourself well, yeah, that’s patently obvious. If I told you to create a website without using any of these three technologies, you would probably have some questions.
And yet, throughout the course of history, we’ve had many players in this space. We’ve had Flash, we’ve had Silverlight, all competing technologies that have attempted to shave off a slice of the browser market, to let the developer use a different technology to create a website. But none of them have really ever taken off. So how is it possible that I am coming to you, dear reader, and telling you that there could yet again be a competitor in this space? Especially after literally none of the other players in this space have gone anywhere, despite years of effort?
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Well, let’s take a minute to appreciate the things that these past attempts have had in common, namely:
1. They needed a browser plugin to run. They normally need a platform-specific browser plugin to run on a targeted platform. Silverlight is a good example of this — at the time, people who use Linux couldn’t watch Netflix, as the site depended on Silverlight (which wasn’t available for Linux). Sure, there were open source alternatives, but nothing first-party.
2. They introduced security vulnerabilities. Flash was notorious for this (with over 1,000 known vulnerabilities). The browser would have to load a plugin to display the content, and at that point, none of the security safeguards of the browser mattered, as the plugin had complete access to the host computer.
3. The performance was not as good as pure HTML. In terms of whether it was faster to load a plugin and display some text, it was always faster to just do it in raw HTML and CSS as opposed to trying to load a plugin to display some content for you.
4. HTML5 came, and CSS improved. Suddenly, creating beautiful, involving experiences wasn’t impossible. Better still, browsers that hated standards, used weird hacks, or used vendor-specific implementations instead of their CSS equivalents (like Internet Explorer) were killed off.
All of these things made the choice to create a new web app in native HTML easy. After all, if the technology that you used to create your web experience got deprecated, and stopped receiving security fixes, then there would be no option but to rewrite your app from scratch in a new, supported language. But how did we get here in the first place? How did HTML become such a mainstay in today’s thriving internet?
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The Dawn of a New Era
On the 6th of August 1991, the web went live to the world. Then eventually we had the so-called dot-com bubble come and go. Consider for a moment that the web only came into existence for public use in 1991, and then nine years later the dot-com bubble burst, costing an astonishing $1.7 trillion. That means that the dot-com bubble cost about as much as 15% of the United States’ GDP that same year.
We’re in that part of history because that’s about the time when the web was starting to become more and more formal, and the way we were writing websites was becoming more standardized. Over time, we gained standards like HTML4 that we could use, and these standards ensured that the HTML you write in your part of the world will work for most, if not all, HTML interpreters. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) also entered circulation in 1996, and the year before that, JavaScript also entered the scene. Can you imagine seeing or using a website with no JavaScript or CSS? It would not be an enjoyable experience, that’s for sure.
But throughout all of history, some things with the web stayed the same. To be fair, a lot of it had to: You would never want to introduce breaking changes to the HTML standard without an extremely good reason for doing so, so changing large swathes of how the web works in future versions was probably never going to happen. This left us with the web as we have it today, and what does that include?
The document
When the web first came into existence, people were not using apps as they are today. Some of you may remember using terminals that acted as thin clients, giving you a physical connection to a mainframe on the other end of the physical connection. The “apps” (if you could call them that) that people had were little more than lines of text on a screen. People were used to dealing with things as documents, as physical pieces of paper in their hands that they could peruse. It comes as no surprise then that the basis of HTML pages is to produce an HTML document. If you’ve ever used any JavaScript, you will be familiar with functions like document.getElementById(). Everything that you do on a webpage is to produce and then transform the document.
Traditionally, most webpages are too high to fit in one viewport. So the user would have to swipe through the page with their finger or scroll with the mouse. I can’t think of a website that I use today that fits neatly into the users’ viewport (certainly not this diatribe), so the developer would always be guaranteed that there would be some part of the page that would either be above or below where the user was currently looking on their page.
But still, you would want certain parts of your webpage to stay in a certain position or align in a certain way. You start using things like position in CSS to control where your elements are laid out. There’s a tonne of CSS properties (520 to be exact), and as the name would imply, these styles cascade into their child elements. When you are trying to get a particular part of your document to look a certain way, it can get fairly chaotic. If you are using an existing styling framework like Angular Material, then it also gets pretty zesty, as you start to override the built-in CSS to achieve a certain look that you are after. CSS lets you override this by using !override, but once you start doing that, the battle is largely lost. If you’re reading this and thinking to yourself “What? This guy sounds like he is hopeless at CSS,” then that’s okay and I wouldn’t fight you on that point. But when your designers are chasing a certain look, the CSS can get pretty complicated.
Learning the languages
In order to create a simple website, you need to be across three separate languages, and that’s purely for the website itself. That’s HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Your website has to look and feel great, and it can’t do that if you don’t know how to write performant JavaScript or if your CSS styling is bad.
If you actually want your website to do anything, then you might use a framework like Angular or React. As you start to bring in packages via npm, the size of your app starts to grow, so you will also use a bundler like webpack to tie all your packages together and minify them appropriately. Webpack is a topic in itself (and a huge one at that) but it’s a worthwhile topic to consider and does form a considerable part of building web apps.
Bundling and transpilations
Once you have your website and you have your packages, you need to use a bundler to bundle up your client app and to make sure that it works in their browser. Depending on what browser they are using, you’ll also need to “shim” in certain features so the user’s browser can actually use your website. If you’re using a language like TypeScript, webpack also transpiles from this language into JavaScript. Nothing about this is inherently bad, but it is very complex and has a lot of moving parts. If your website breaks, did you mess up the code, or did the minification break it, or did webpack not include it properly, or did the transpilation process introduce a problem? These complicated pipelines can introduce difficulties in debugging or finding the root cause of issues in your app.
How Is Flutter Any Better?
If you’ve heard of Flutter, you’ve likely heard of it in the context of phone app development. So how on earth does it apply to websites? Well, with a normal HTML webpage, you deal with the page as a document. In Flutter though, the “page” (or what the user interacts with) is actually drawn to an HTML canvas. Flutter actually controls every pixel that is drawn to the screen and doesn’t use HTML, JavaScript, or CSS to define any of its look or logic. (Technically speaking, native Dart code is transpiled to JavaScript through dart2js, but no business logic is actually written in JavaScript.)
You’ve likely picked up two things alarming with that sentence. First, no HTML. Second, we’re drawing everything to the canvas. I get it — it sounds weird and, at least in the case of drawing to the canvas directly, not very performant. But let’s dig into this a little bit more.
