There's a bunch of interest in doing this widely to a huge part of the web. Removing all (almost all) HTML/DOM & using WebGL or WebGPU, having the page load a big wasm rendering engine & doing all the interactivity through that.
The original Hixie (former editor of HTML5) manifesto/proposal even included using WebUSB to talk directly to input devices!!
Flutter/CanvasKit[1] & Ian Hixie[2] are actively pursuing/shipping this. There's a blog suggesting Jetpack Compose goes this route[3]. Seems like interest is going to keep growing. These folks say they are just doing it so developers can build "pixel perfect" apps, but oh, it also coincidentally means users have no control or say in the pixel's as they'd prefer them. Not everything written will necessarily be as Lawful Evil/impedeing-basic-human-use as what Amazon is up to here, but it'll be up to each org & each dev what pixels on the screen are interactable how.
One huge nightmare/opaque infernally damned shitworld.
Google did it to Docs also, with the same effect. They had even received letters from the Disability Services Offices at leading/large universities, including Stanford, asking them not to.
Ironically, my plugin still works on Docs...but only on comments. The body text is untouchable.
I thought docs was working? At least in Mac's voice over on a laptop. There's also a menu setting to turn on more accessibility things. Not sure what that actually does though. But as of December VO could read the body text.
There are ways to have some accessibility support, but still break absolutely every extension an accessibility user might want to use (already know/enjoy), by not having HTML/DOM.
These efforts will, in some cases, have hacks & workarounds. The ARIA group is active building alternative imperative accessibility options for graphical systems. Every one of the folks involved ripping out the actual html web for their own developer-defined Canvas-powered stack realizes accessibility is a minimum legal requiremement. But it can still violate every norm & break every tool an accessobility user wants to use/has ever used, and tick this legal box. It can still be a nightmare hellscape for them. (It probably will be.)
And we get much accessibility by default from having DOM/HTML. It's quite possible that these "Modern" un-web apps have accessibility options in the framework, but that many developers botch up or dont spend the time to use these accessibility options, or they use them poorly. There's plenty of A11Y/ARIA concerns sites should consider on the current web, and fail to do great. But the baseline can be ok, & the user can refine the site/experience (since it's html/dom)!!!! Whether the baseline did-nothing experience stays the same/gets better/gets worse for users (assuming they happen to have compatible a11y tools, per above paragraphs) on these "Modern" un-web apps is very TBD, and I tend strongly towards believing it'll be worse. And it wont be as malleable.
Since the publishers aren't able to directly control the user's OS, it seems they're trying to bypass the OS in a way by doing everything in the GPU where it's extremely difficult to access it from the OS.
The original Hixie (former editor of HTML5) manifesto/proposal even included using WebUSB to talk directly to input devices!!
Flutter/CanvasKit[1] & Ian Hixie[2] are actively pursuing/shipping this. There's a blog suggesting Jetpack Compose goes this route[3]. Seems like interest is going to keep growing. These folks say they are just doing it so developers can build "pixel perfect" apps, but oh, it also coincidentally means users have no control or say in the pixel's as they'd prefer them. Not everything written will necessarily be as Lawful Evil/impedeing-basic-human-use as what Amazon is up to here, but it'll be up to each org & each dev what pixels on the screen are interactable how.
One huge nightmare/opaque infernally damned shitworld.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34527980
[2] "Towards a Moderm Web Stack" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1peUSMsvFGvqD5yKh3GprskLC... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34779746