I've been kind of holding my tongue on this because I don't like raining down anybody's parade but I'd be lying if I said that I wouldn't have any objections to having a full blown HTML/CSS/Javascript stack running in the engine.
HTML and CSS is probably now the golden standard for laying out UIs these days but do we honestly need all the features that HTML offers? Or CSS? How do we handle <a hrefs>? Or tables? Or weird tags that aren't pertinent to our engine like <h1> or <title>.
I've been trying to say pretty much the same thing, but what I keep getting back seems to be along the lines of "unless you have something made of distilled awesome to suggest, we are just going to default to a full browser stack because it's comfortable and familiar rather than actually exploring other (potentially better) options"
(the examples I have been giving of the different types of things out there seem to keep getting taken as suggestions for what we should be using, when the main point I have been trying to make is a full browser stack is wholly unnecessary and FFS do some research and actually check to see what is the best solution rather than just settling, so here's a couple of ideas for where you might start looking)
A full browser stack isn't needed, because most of the functions provided by HTML aren't needed or useful for our purposes.
I can agree to a pared down library that uses HTML syntax but is pared down to only what is actually useful for our purposes. I can't do any programming of the FSO engine, but I will at least look at that in some detail when I get the chance.
I obviously have no qualms raining on someone's parade if I think it might make things work better.
I'm kind of a dick like that.
Gmail.
Not exactly what I was looking for, thought you meant fully featured desktop programs. I've seen tons of web apps for various different things, but they tend to be fairly lightweight applications whose primary purpose is interaction with web resources.
This is an antiquated notion of what a web browser, html, css and javascript are for. All of these things have made massive strides towards making it possible to build applications on them in recent years.
See above for examples of stuff that is useless for our purposes. I know the W3C has expanded HTML CSS and javascript since their aim is to replace platform specific apps with web apps and depreciate browser pugins, so you can, for instance, open a browser rather than the app store to interact with things, and watch videos without flash.
Good goals, but, again, the language set contains WAY more than we would ever need to use, so you shouldn't be trying to use ALL of it.
Also note, FSO is not a web app, it's a rather intensive desktop application, and the suggestion is to use HTML rendering as a subsystem inside it rather than being the framework the program is actually built with.
There is no reason to invoke the HTML renderer unless it is specifically requested to run by a mod. Also, there are no real limitations on memory use; right now, the most complex FSO missions rarely use more than 2 GB of memory. We have some headroom to play with in that regard, I believe.
fair enough, just felt I had to bring it up since the early discussion was retail compatibility, and one reason to run retail is lack of computing power.
We may be over-thinking the entire thing, though. The thing most familiar to FSO modders is going to be tables, and another possibility would be to distribute interface artwork in a similar manner to the assets already used, but replace the actions hardcoded into the engine with a table that says what space each button takes up, and what it does.