Instead of developing a unique system that only resembles web development, why doesn’t Unity focus its resources on creating an efficient bridge between Unity and HTML? Such an approach would seemingly offer broader and less limited potential.
I find it perplexing that Unity continues to invest in creating something “new” that essentially duplicates an existing, superior solution. By emulating current technologies, Unity is missing the opportunity to leverage the well-established strengths of HTML and the web ecosystem. A seamless integration with HTML could enhance the flexibility and reach of Unity projects, allowing developers to tap into the extensive capabilities of web development while still utilizing Unity’s powerful features.
Almost every commercial UI Engine on the market utilizes HTML.
First of all, what’s the point of complaining now about something so fundamental? It’s certainly not going to change now.
UI Toolkit has been around for years, and it’s free. If you don’t like it, then pay for and use those commercial engines which certainly satisfy a number of other developer needs, such as easing web developers into game engines, or enabling GUI scripting with javascript.
Would you also find it perplexing if Unity built a HTML renderer to support your way of approaching this?
You can’t just drop in Chromium to do the rendering because it’ll be too slow and bloated for a realtime game engine. At the same time if Unity did support HTML syntax it wouldn’t actually be proper HTML but merely a form of XML with known tags. The same goes for CSS. Not all of the HTML standard features make sense in a game engine.
Therefore the common HTML design tools wouldn’t work with GUI design. They provide features that just wouldn’t work in a game engine, and everyone would come crying to Unity for help if their preferred tool of choice doesn’t support feature X (perhaps the tag? ).
Pretty sure one, several, or even all of these commercial GUI engines have that exact problem: their file format may have the .html and .css extensions and it sort of looks the part and it may even be designable with MS Frontpage but if you fancy using the full HTML syntax and features they won’t work.
Or they do provide their own GUI tools, to combat this content design / user expectations issue. Quite like Unity does with UI Builder.
So here is the thing HTML is very misleading when we call it the defacto web structure language.
XML which Unity’s UXML is inspired by and working with is used for a lot of web sites. Several .Net based UI web system, which .Net is the framework Unity uses for their engine, uses XAML a XML based language.
.Net MAUI, Blazor, Razor pages, Xamarin, and so forth all use XAML and XML. Yes, you can use HTML in them, but a lot of it is XML or XAML. Look at the project solution of a Unity project as an example.
So trying to add HTML into Unity instead of using XML would of been actually trying to reinvent the wheel and been the option that would of added another language where Unity already used XML based languages before hand.
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