Ask HN: Do we need X11 for the web?

Perhaps not literally X11. What I think we need is some intermediate layer (an interface not dissimilar from the DOM) that can operate on an implementation of an interface. This way, you write your web frameworks (such as React or Vue) to target this intermediate layer, then you can plug in whatever implementation you want; be it the DOM, WebGL, Canvas, or whatever future technology may come along.

Unlike the DOM it might make sense to make this interface asynchronous, so you could even allow for more novel display implementations (Minecraft blocks as pixels, for example.)

I was thinking about this because as WebAssembly gets more popular it’s becoming increasingly obvious that it is limiting to expect the availability of the DOM.

This could probably even be done unofficially and then later implemented as a standard browser API. There was talk about incorporating React directly into the browser. I see this as a much better solution as it’s framework agnostic. You could even create an implementation of a virtual DOM that wraps the regular DOM adapter/implementation.