I know we don't have anything to show right now, I didn't put this on HNews... we're still about 2 months from actually doing something like a public release, so sorry about that. But be assured that we'll have something to play with pretty soon :D
The framework I mentioned (Firebreath) already provides an abstraction layer for those APIs. I agree iOS will be the hardest nut to crack, but since this is a long-term project I'm pretty sure we'll be able to work something out (either by Apple's blessing, by providing an HTML fallback mechanism or something else) when the time is right. Right now we're just trying to figure out if it is at all possible to create a better technology...
Why do you think that you'd throw out hardware acceleration? The latest Flash has hw accelerated video, for example, so not at all impossible. Advanced layout logic? Don't make me laugh... do you mean floats? Or inline-blocks? I've had my share of trouble using theme (I'm a web designer with many years of experience...). Layout is exactly one thing that we're trying to do better! And to use flexbox and all the other new layout stuff reliably you'll still have to wait a couple of years, I think. Then you'll probably still need to create a conventional layout for older clients for much time ahead...
And for the text rendering, there are plenty of open source libraries out there, we won't reinvent the universe from scratch just to make an apple pie.
As I said... the prototype will soon be available for anyone to try out so web designers and programmers will be able to play with it as a browser plug-in, this is not just some crazy random idea ;)
The framework I mentioned (Firebreath) already provides an abstraction layer for those APIs. I agree iOS will be the hardest nut to crack, but since this is a long-term project I'm pretty sure we'll be able to work something out (either by Apple's blessing, by providing an HTML fallback mechanism or something else) when the time is right. Right now we're just trying to figure out if it is at all possible to create a better technology...
Why do you think that you'd throw out hardware acceleration? The latest Flash has hw accelerated video, for example, so not at all impossible. Advanced layout logic? Don't make me laugh... do you mean floats? Or inline-blocks? I've had my share of trouble using theme (I'm a web designer with many years of experience...). Layout is exactly one thing that we're trying to do better! And to use flexbox and all the other new layout stuff reliably you'll still have to wait a couple of years, I think. Then you'll probably still need to create a conventional layout for older clients for much time ahead...
And for the text rendering, there are plenty of open source libraries out there, we won't reinvent the universe from scratch just to make an apple pie.
As I said... the prototype will soon be available for anyone to try out so web designers and programmers will be able to play with it as a browser plug-in, this is not just some crazy random idea ;)