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Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

This. They can have all the deviations they want, but “input core” must be native. If a framework ignores it, users will notice and frown upon it immediately.

When flutter came out publicly, first I thought no way it can get away with custom everything. But it turned out some developers don’t care about that at all.

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I disagree with this so much for two reasons:

1. I shipped more than five Flutter web apps with actual users for a couple of years, and it's been a great experience so far.

2. "Native" web core should burn in hell, and I hope Wasm will finally contribute to it. Amount of developers who do not realize that "native web" is a typesetting engine from 80s with a pile of hacks on top of it, is too large to fight the opinion, of course. And yet, as a developer, I care about using the right tool for the right task, and no amount of browser engine optimization can change the fact that XML-based markup language is not the right tool for modern performant cross-platforms UIs.

Native doesn’t mean web. I meant just an input as it works everywhere on a platform, input core.

Partially agree on the web sentiment, it just lacks a proper model, both positioning and styling, for what we call apps.

you know that zero texting apps nowadays use native input anyway right? even native apps will implement their own input and it's always awful, but the pm needs those style previews... (you're still right thought)

Checked my whatsapp and tg, both use absolutely native inputs. The selection handles & menu, the hold-spacebar movement, the hold-to-magnify feature on ios is the same as everywhere else. If that’s not native, they did a great job for nothing.

Too lazy to check on android rn, but I recently worked with the apps/chats on it and entered text, it didn’t feel different.

In fact the input field is one of the few native UI surfaces in the Telegram app.

it's not a native widget. you can type styles on whatsapp which is not possible on native input.

whatsapp is the poster child of this technique btw.

Styles are possible with native text view, otherwise we couldn’t have fonts and colors and contenteditable and selection within <p>. I think you mistake “input core” with “web input element” here. The core I’m talking about is a text cell with characters on it that has no concept of own border. Controls like NSTextField, Win32.TextBox, GtkEntry - they all have platform text input (and output) system underneath. In case of gtk it implements it itself, cause X has none. The thing that implements all the familiar behaviors of the text input that you know.

So yes, compared to HTMLInputElement these are absolutely custom. But for a platform, absolutely native.

Do you have an example of a texting app that doesn't use native input? This just straight up doesn't seem accurate.

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