Ask HN: Non-JavaScript DOM Manipulation | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Non-JavaScript DOM Manipulation

3 pointsapi8 comments

I'm researching cross-platform UI and of course Electron and its relatives come up.

I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with using a web rendering engine as a presentation layer, but I don't like the bloat and know that at least some of that bloat comes from the fact that the UI layer is a web app written in JS. I'm also not a fan of JS.

Is there anything out there that allows you to pop open a web rendered window and control the DOM from outside from another language? Seems to me that this would let you do sophisticated HTML5 UIs maybe leveraging things like Bootstrap and Framework7 but without JavaScript and thus without the associated JS VM bloat.

If there isn't anything like this, someone should make it.

View on HN

There's this https://rustwasm.github.io/wasm-bindgen/examples/dom.html

That looks like it runs browser side though. I was thinking of something that can control the DOM from behind the browser UI window for local UI development use. Basically just use the web renderer as a renderer in place of e.g. Qt.

Not sure I understand what you want. If you want to use DOM without JS, web assembly is the only option. If what you want is to call a DOM API without using a browser, there's jsdom. If you want to drive a browser from outside of it there's Chrome Debugger Protocol. But ultimately you'll need a browser if you want to display a UI that is powered by the DOM.

If what you're looking for is a cross-platform API, you could look into React Native, Flutter or Haxe.

The DOM is just state in the browser. I'm curious about whether there's any APIs out there to manipulate that state from code outside the browser, e.g. C/C++ code that is including and instantiating a web control.

It seems like an obvious idea but I have never seen anyone do it.

It sounds like you're looking for something like the Chrome Debugger Protocol. There are wrappers over it such as Puppeteer that let you spawn a browser instance and call arbitrary DOM APIs.

I'm thinking of something functionally similar but more efficient and geared toward UI use.

I'm afraid that doesn't exist, short from forking Chromium.

It should. The web rendering engine is a good way to render but JS adds lots of bloat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com