Hi, the recent 2018 highlight blog post talked about plans for a vNext Render Api to make use of third party canvas/openGl renders as an alternative/improvement to HTML/CSS
MS are developing Blazor, one aim being to replace JS with the .net framework and languages within the browser, but from what they have discussed publicly they seem happy with HTML/CSS
Do you envisage a coming together? Local web apps being written in .net , using an openGl render, with Aurelia providing the glue?
I’m not sure if Aurelia and Blazor could integrate in that way since Blazor is really its own front-end framework. It would be possible to write a .NET app, compile to WASM, and have it render with WebGL though. I have to admit that I’m very disappointed with Microsoft’s approaches with Blazor. IMO, it’s a huge mistake that their design is so tied to HTML in that way. Aside from WASM, Blazor isn’t very forward looking. I have other issues with Blazor as well, but I don’t want to sidetrack too much here.
Aurelia’s main work is to abstract the actual HTML pieces out of the core so that we can teach Aurelia to render to anything. Our PoCs teach Aurelia to render to Three.js, as an example, but it could really be almost anything now that we’ve done the work to create the proper abstractions. Will Aurelia provide a full WebGL alternative for building apps? That’s a huge task but not out of the question. Probably not soon, but we want vNext to be designed as such so that if we want to go that way down the road, we don’t have to re-architect the core.
I completely agree, I want to see HTML die, but it’s not happening anytime soon. Is WebGL an issue on mobile devices? I know poor html/js is still a big issue, but are non desktop devices a main issue there?
If you can target the latest versions of browsers, WebGL has pretty strong support across the board. See here: https://caniuse.com/#feat=webgl