Interesting, thanks! It looks like Figma (a clear success) also took the "just give me a canvas" route:
"Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser. […] Instead of attempting to get one of these to work, we implemented everything from scratch using WebGL. Our renderer is a highly-optimized tile-based engine with support for masking, blurring, dithered gradients, blend modes, nested layer opacity, and more. All rendering is done on the GPU and is fully anti-aliased. Internally our code looks a lot like a browser inside a browser; we have our own DOM, our own compositor, our own text layout engine, and we’re thinking about adding a render tree just like the one browsers use to render HTML."https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
The value proposition of a "boil the ocean" approach to UX frameworks is clearer for browser-based apps than native apps. That said, 7 years in, Figma apparently has a long way to go:
"To repeat a familiar refrain: We still have a lot of work to do! As we continue to improve access to our own products, we’re also advancing our understanding of what our users need to design accessibly."https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-figjam-screen-reader-s...
"Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser. […] Instead of attempting to get one of these to work, we implemented everything from scratch using WebGL. Our renderer is a highly-optimized tile-based engine with support for masking, blurring, dithered gradients, blend modes, nested layer opacity, and more. All rendering is done on the GPU and is fully anti-aliased. Internally our code looks a lot like a browser inside a browser; we have our own DOM, our own compositor, our own text layout engine, and we’re thinking about adding a render tree just like the one browsers use to render HTML." https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...
The value proposition of a "boil the ocean" approach to UX frameworks is clearer for browser-based apps than native apps. That said, 7 years in, Figma apparently has a long way to go:
"To repeat a familiar refrain: We still have a lot of work to do! As we continue to improve access to our own products, we’re also advancing our understanding of what our users need to design accessibly." https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-figjam-screen-reader-s...