Crosscut

There's another consideration when deciding whether to build the next editor with web technologies, or whether to go with a custom solution based on the bare GPU: Crosscut code should be able to expand the editor UI.

Specifically, Crosscut libraries should be able to ship with custom UI elements to visualize and edit their core data types. (I wrote about that before.) That should be a simple thing to do, so I wouldn't want to prescribe using web technologies for that. (Nor would I want to invite the bloat that would probably result from this decision.)

So those editor extensions would probably be based on custom technology (or re-use something simple). With a web-based editor, there would be the question of how to integrate that. While with a custom-built UI, we'd have a lot of flexibility, even to the point of fully re-using the custom UI framework for these extensions.