121–130 of 259 posts
I know a lot of people long for the days when the web was just text and a few JPGs. I personally am waiting for the web to become a rich, ubiquitous, standardised application delivery platform that works on any device. I think web assembly adds to the richness while being fairly standardised, so I welcome it!
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Which is a terrible usability nightmare waiting to happen... Seriously, DON'T do this. This breaks ctrl-f. This is unlikely to work well for people who need to enlarge text or enhance contrast due to vision impairment. This breaks screen readers. This will probably break most site archive navigators, so your content is lost to history (e.g. wayback machine). This will probably prevent Google from indexing your site,…
Too late, WebAssembly is already here. I really think it will bring Flash like web sites back, and browser vendors are the ones actually pushing it. The wheels are already in motion, with everyone trying to port their favorite language or VM into WebAssembly. For example, today it is Qt WebGL Streaming, tomorrow it might just run directly from WebAssembly. http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/07/07/qt-webgl-streaming-merged/…
"Add support for WebAssembly as target platform for Qt
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Problem is, adding to the bl… sorry, richness , doesn't remove the old cruft. How about having an application platform that would be just an application platform? No HTML, no CSS, no built in multimedia. Just a VM, a viewport, audio, and inputs (and local storage if the user allows it).
But that's also the beauty of it. Within the browser we can support the old and the new without too much trouble.
A market with only 4 competitors (Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple), is not a market. It's an oligarchy.
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We already tried that - Java Applets. Silverligt was the same idea. And Flash I guess? All attempts failed in the marketplace. It turns out using higher level standards like HTML, CSS, URL's etc actually provide a a lot of value.
Obligatory point that Flash didn't fail in the marketplace. Rather, it was wildly popular, so much so that Microsoft eventually felt the need to develop a comparable tech -- Silverlight. Flash on the web faltered rapidly after many years of efforts by Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and associated individuals. They were looking to move the web 'forward' had a high-profile disagreement with W3C, so they started their own stand…
The toolchain feels pretty clumsy and bloated, there are many intermediary stages that should be done automatically. I hope better alternatives will quickly become available, or at least some package where you don't to install a thing inside the thing you already downloaded and installed.
I'm worried that this will make the JavaScript trap[1] even more of a problem. The default operation of the web is to allow remote sites to push non-free applications to your browser that it then proceeds to execute. As people have been shifting towards running everything in the browser (just like people like me run everything in Emacs), this effectively results in a revival of ubiquitous proprietary software. I don'…
That's a little condescending, considering the amount of non-trivial, critical applications written in JavaScript. And it ignores the progress made on the language and tooling of the last oh i don't know, 20 years.
> JavaScript has a bad reputation, but in reality is a good language for what is was designed for: quickly write small scripts. That's a little condescending, considering the amount of non-trivial, critical applications written in JavaScript. And it ignores the progress made on the language and tooling of the last oh i don't know, 20 years.
I know a lot of people long for the days when the web was just text and a few JPGs. I personally am waiting for the web to become a rich, ubiquitous, standardised application delivery platform that works on any device. I think web assembly adds to the richness while being fairly standardised, so I welcome it!
Good luck running an ad blocker when every site is run in wasm and rendered to canvas.
Also rendering the whole page in a canvas implies forgoing the entire DOM, which leaves behind basics like links, forms, embedded videos, etc. It would also mean getting raw input and drawing+laying out everything yourself instead of letting the browser do it.
I am betting when WebAssembly gets mature all Web sites will look like Flash, just coded on the framework of choice, thus finally making the browser just yet another VM.