zackbrown

On the other hand, video games enable a wide breadth of intellectual experiences.

Being a simulated guitar hero and simulated pro skater is more enriching than the likely baseline of having zero experience with either.

And, video games can help in discovering real world passions — the number of guitarists who found their inspirational spark through Guitar Hero is likely significant. Same for Factorio or Minecraft -> programming.

That's great to hear! C# was my first love as a programming language, but it's been some years. We would love to support it with Pax.

Thanks for this report! It seems one of the demo videos on the mobile site was too large; we have deployed a fix.

Highly recommend trying out the site on desktop, where you will get an interactive preview of Pax Designer.

Pax's primary goal is "designability" — to enable a vector design tool to read & write the same content & behavior you may write by hand. (.pax files)

Our solution requires language constraints — a hermetic separation of concerns between the declarative description language (.pax) and a Turing-complete programming language (starting with Rust.)

These language constraints and rendering requirements[0] are so core to our solution that building anywhere other than the systems level was not tenable.

[0] Specifically, the runtime must render in "design tool coordinates," to enable a vector design tool authoring UX. This authoring experience must also be extremely fast, like Figma's. The rendering engine must be designed around this requirement and neither HTML/CSS's or Flutter's were.

Agreed! Markup-as-content-backbone is one of many things HTML/CSS do extremely well, and I agree not building around something like this was a major weakness of Flash.

Silverlight sought to do this with XAML, but it had other problems (required a plugin right as plugins were on their way out; CLR was a huge dependency; too locked down and proprietary under Ballmer leadership)

Can you imagine a text-first content representation, which is visually editable with the UX of a vector design tool? This is the rabbit hole that drives our work on Pax.

Thank you for the tip!

Primary goal of Pax is "designability" -- any project can be opened and edited visually at any time with Pax Designer, which is a vector design tool.

The difference between Webflow and Figma is immense; Pax unlocks a Figma-style visual creative experience while building software.

I won't claim Pax is better than any of these, but that we seek to solve different goals.

Unlike Flash: driven by a markup language, fully open source, no plugin required, solves a11y, compiles to native apps incl. mobile

Unlike Silverlight: fully open source, no plugin required, no heavy VM

Unlike JavaFX: no plugin required, no heavy VM, visual builder is a vector design tool

Unlike Flutter: designed for web (small footprint, a11y out of the box); first-party and foundationally integrated visual builder, visual builder is a vector design tool

Both Figma autolayout and HStack / VStack are careful subsets of flexbox; not quite the same thing. Consider whether a marble statue is "just a subset" of the block that contained it.

None of these is a perfect technology, but I believe the most practical answer to the question driving this thread[0] is to study/understand the landscape, then build towards a better future.[1]

[0] > Care to point us to a better combination than HTML/CSS when it comes to layouting flexible interfaces?

[1] www.pax.dev

> Alternate layout engines for the web might be a fun experiment, PhD thesis, or talent retention program, but it's not practical.

Flexbox was once an "alternate layout engine for the web," as was Flash player, as is Figma. Framer, Retool, and Squarespace all offer alternate layout engines tailored for visual building. All of these seem practical to me.

> Care to point us to a better combination than HTML/CSS when it comes to layouting flexible interfaces?

HTML/CSS is pretty good!

SwiftUI's HStack and VStack are solid, though they suffer from ambient API complexity & Conway's law.[0]

Figma's autolayout is a strong reference, but it's not a tool for creating software.

> Maybe instead of coming up with a new thing, we just need a clear way to solve the pain points and put the solutions into CSS4 and HTML6

Why not both? Innovate freely and independently (the prerogative of any builder) and adopt as spec any innovations that pass committee.

[0] arguably same diagnosis, different course of disease vs. HTML/CSS