Re: [Texmacs-dev] TeXmacs & Webassembly

[TeXmacs]

On Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 12:57:05AM +0100, Massimiliano Gubinelli wrote:
> Sure, this is essentially the first version which can interpret user input in 
> some useful way. The browser impose some constraints so some work is needed 
> to have working windows and popup.

Yes, but despite all problems, it works already impressively well.
Although menus are problematic, help balloons do work as expected,
curiously (but not the new preview balloons!?).  Plug-ins also
don't work (as expected) and I don't understand yet how local files
are managed.

> > This looks very promising indeed.  I assume that we could
> > let TeXmacs run on one or more public servers in this way.
> 
> TeXmacs technically runs on your machine, never on the server. You need a 
> server only to serve the code and the data. But this simplifies drastically 
> the distribution since there is only one executable for all the OS and it 
> could work also on tablets. 

Very attractive indeed.

> > Any reason why you used the old Widkit instead of the Qt port?
> 
> Yes, I'm not sure what is the right approach for the UI in the browser.
> 
> 1) one possibility is that progressively one move the UI from Widkit to the 
> enclosing browser using standard HTML elements. In this respect Qt is a bit 
> redundant since we do not need anymore the cross-platform layer. Ideally, at 
> the end, all the UI can be implemented in HTML and the graphical canvas 
> contains only the document. This would use the best of the two technologies: 
> the input and the math typesetting is dealt with TeXmacs/C++/Scheme and the 
> UI via the browser/HTML/CSS/Javascript.
> 
> ( this is the approach used in AutoCAD web: 
> https://www.autodesk.com/products/autocad-web-app/overview 
> <https://www.autodesk.com/products/autocad-web-app/overview> )

I like this approach.  Some comments:

  - I would prefer to be able to have TeXmacs markup for all UI elements in 
that case,
    which would be even more uniform and elegant from the TeXmacs perspective.
    We do not use much (buttons, popups, and canvases with scrollbars, mainly),
    so this seems very doable.  Nothing prevents us from having converters from
    and to Html for such new markup elements.

  - While writing the Qt stylesheets, I noticed that this forced me to move away
    from the "native look and feel", which was part of the original appeal of 
Qt.
    But well-designed style sheets might even offer a better user experience.

  - I also like the single window approach.  In fact, I don't like windows that
    pop up at random places on my screen and would prefer to have everything in
    one or two side panes.  This will be an ongoing development of mine anyway.

> 2) One keep using Qt, but has anyway to come up with a different UI than the 
> desktop version since there are limitations of the web platform, e.g. no 
> multiple windows, no modal dialogs, etc... We need to have a "single window" 
> application. If the user wants to have multiple documents it can run multiple 
> instances of TeXmacs in different windows I guess.
> 
> (something like: https://www.qt.io/web-assembly-example-slate 
> <https://www.qt.io/web-assembly-example-slate> )
> 
> Anyway, I will try, as soon as I find some time, to compile the standard Qt 
> interface, it should be possible. 

I guess that we would still need something like this for transitional purposes,
if we want to pursue the webassembly port.

Best wishes, --Joris