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W3C recommends WebAssembly

w3.org

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Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#221

Post by BlueTemplar »

shadowgovt wrote: post #209
BlueTemplar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fancy stuff can go live in apps, it has nothing to do in a browser designed for webpages first. I mean, just compare the GUIs of VLC and YouTube!

But with the strong advantages of access to the Internet that a website brings (which is itself a whole bag of hard problems to solve), the appeal of building things accessible via browser user-agent (regardless of what the thing is) is huge. It shouldn't be necessary to toss out the cookie jar, the HTTP connection handler, the XSS protection just because one wants to do something a bit different with the final rende…

What prevents access to the Internet from a non-website ? Why use the HyperTEXT Transfer Protocol for things completely unrelated to text - it's not like other, more appropriate protocols are not available, or cannot be designed ! (Or that URLs are limited to HTTP...)

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#222

Post by andrewaylett »

dmvinson wrote: post #14

This feels like another step away from the free and open web many people are clamoring for. Distributing opaque binaries with websites instead of Javascript is a step past even the obfuscated minified javascript files meant to be confusing. At least those can still be debugged, stepped through, and explored freely by the end user if they want to learn or reverse engineer. Is there any tool or standard being worked on…

My employer quite deliberately publishes source maps alongside our javascript, so people who want to tinker and learn don't lose the ability to see what we're doing, but end users (our press pack says we serve pages to around 1% of people in any given month) don't have to pay the cost of downloading unminified JS for every page load. I suspect that if we ever start using WASM, we'll do the same thing.

Just because you _can_ use the compliation step to (go some way to) hide your source doesn't mean you _have_ to. And relying on your secret sauce being private while you publish it in obfuscated form for all the world to decypher feels like a losing strategy.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#223

Post by root_axis »

Pete_D wrote: post #193
simias wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the history of the web it's clear that the tendency has always been towards "shinier things". This "historic separation" was the result of technical limitations, see how popular Flash used to be for instance. HTML and CSS standards were always at least 10 years too late. If you wanted something that looked modern you've always had to use browser-specific extensions, plugins or, at best, "beta" features…

The change in dev culture worries me more than the change in technology. At least Flash sites used to be considered bad taste. Dare to grumble about something unnecessarily requiring gratuitous JS now, and you'll get berated as an out-of-touch Luddite who needs to shut up and get with the times.

By definition, everyone agrees that "gratuitous" use of JS is bad. You're glossing over the nuance of the debate which comes down to the specifics of when something is actually gratuitous.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#224

Post by oaiey »

mahidhar wrote: post #199
EvanAnderson wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we don't lose the HTML-centered model, we are probably going to lose control of our browsers. Eventually somebody is going to ship a product that's nothing more than a browser implemented in WASM that runs inside your browser. The "inner browser" won't have content filtering, privacy controls, DOM inspector, or a Javascript debugger (for the Javascript engine running on the "inner browser") that you can inter…

Unfortunately, I must agree with you that there are definitely some very troubling implications to how WebAssembly might be used to build more effective walled gardens on the web. I can easily imagine a "platform" WASM module which acts as a runtime for other WASM modules built by "app" developers. This Platform module can be easily cached by FAANG or other big commercial interests, similar to AMP by Google (maybe ev…

This platform wasm will come. And it does not You do not need to be evil, especially in the beginning. Java or .NET Runtime and Libraries are a bit heavy for a small web page.

And from there it is just the next step to run a base platform like Android user space or a simple runtime like blazor.

In the end wasm is a runtime. There were physical Java Processors and I am pretty sure there will be webassembly processors.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#225

Post by oaiey »

danShumway wrote: post #116
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #69

Whatever you think about javascript, I love the historic separation between content and interactivity. I dislike that so many static pages won't load without JS and that we're moving further in that direction. I hope the evolution towards "browser as OS" doesn't hurt the content vs interactivity separation. Could we ever lose the HTML centered model? That could mean we lose hackability and the ability to write extens…

> Could we ever lose the HTML centered model? This is what people should be worried about, not replacing JS. It became a kind of popular hot-take for a while to say that separation of concerns was a mistake, and that's not how apps get built in the real world, and what we really need is a way to encapsulate all of our DOM and CSS in JS. We need to start pushing back against that idea and keep emphasizing that separat…

Well QT can easily render on any device context (like Canvas) or Xamarin could also easily ship their own controls to render on a Canvas (Microsoft owns more that enough code to do that).

It is a matter of time till we see desktop application hosted in a wasm enabled browser.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#226

Post by als0 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #207
Pete_D wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The change in dev culture worries me more than the change in technology. At least Flash sites used to be considered bad taste. Dare to grumble about something unnecessarily requiring gratuitous JS now, and you'll get berated as an out-of-touch Luddite who needs to shut up and get with the times.

My impression was the criticisms of flash stemmed from its security issues, it’s closed nature, it’s relative unfamiliarity (compared to popular languages of the time), and the nuisance that was making sure you had the right version running on your machine at any given time. Modern JavaScript addressed these issues, hence its popularity over Flash. This doesn’t endorse the gratuitous application of JS for fundamental…

> Modern JavaScript addressed these issues, hence its popularity over Flash

I think that while this is technically true, technical adequacy didn't lure developers away from Flash player. I believe that the real turning point was when Apple decided to break Adobe's monopoly on the web by disallowing Flash player on all their products.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#227

Post by BlueTemplar »

krapp wrote: post #208
BlueTemplar wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you find this stance ridiculous ? Yes, one could say that the Web has "jumped the shark" sometimes after 1997 (took some years), remember the mess when Flash and Java applets were everywhere ? (WebAssembly might be more sleek, but the issue is likely to be the same...) I guess that multimedia could be part of the Web, but support for basic features like audio/video search is (still!) sorely lacking... (Though…

It's ridiculous because you're claiming that HTML is "the web", but that somehow the content that HTML marks up is "not the web." I can guarantee that no one was looking at a Java applet or a Flash site in the 1990s and thinking "I don't know what this is, but it definitely isn't part of the World Wide Web." >Yes, one could say that the Web has "jumped the shark" sometimes after 1997 (took some years), remember the m…

Some examples of search results from Facebook / Discord / Twitter ? And on the same level as other pages, not in some separate field ?

Browsers can do a lot of things these days that are not part of the Web : display pdfs, ftp folders, rtsp streams...

The browser becoming an OS inside the OS is at the crux at the issue. (And the main reason is likely Google trying to wrest control of personal computing from Microsoft.)

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#228

Post by TomMarius »

EvanAnderson wrote: post #218
shadowgovt wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, someone attempting that will have a long row to hoe to get the thing working with the needs of networks with different performance standards, useragents with different screen structures, and users with different accessibility requirements. Browsers are large and complicated software packages for a reason. Best of luck to whoever tries to compete with it in a browser in a browser.

The inner browser doesn't need to be a general purpose browser. It just needs to render the site-owner's content, run their scripts, etc. Once there's an API for WASM to manipulate the DOM accessibility becomes easier.

So react native?

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#229

Post by lsalvatore »

danShumway wrote: post #206
lsalvatore wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frontend Engineer here. That “popular hot-take” is my career, and I happily combine HTML and CSS into my JS every day. React.js has been the most significant JavaScript library in the past decade. Over 50% of JS developers on the web are writing HTML inside JavaScript. In recent years, CSS-in-JS libraries like Styled-components are becoming standard. We’re killing HTML templates and writing JSX. We’re killing CSS cla…

> It’s all compiling to HTML, CSS and JS in the end. I don't generally have a problem with this. I use JSX at work too. My take is it's just another templating system, I don't think it's special. I don't have anything against templating. To a certain extent, my point is that template systems are good -- put your two-way data bindings and special components in them. When I write JSX though, I make sure it renders out…

CSS files are in a league in their own for how badly they represent the state of my app. In no other data structure would we say "oh sure, lets arbitrarily name groups of key/value pairs in a nested hierarchy that may or may not match where they are applied. Also, its a global namespace so let's preface every name with our application name". At scale, CSS classes are really difficult to find when looking at your component and have ambiguous naming and nesting patterns. They shouldn't exist.

Styled-components solves all these problems, randomly generating CSS classes under the hood, while still creating CSS files for you. Check out https://www.styled-components.com/docs/basics#motivation.

I'm not sure I can be sympathetic to "the final HTML DOM output" matching your expectations here. Think about a Dropdown select. We still need to create a library with a bunch of absolutely positioned s here because you literally can't build a good looking dropdown with normal HTML. It's really hard for me to think fondly of HTML/CSS when all they provide is assembly-code level specification. Flexbox and Grid are great counter-examples here. Still no nice looking dropdown.

Re: W3C recommends WebAssembly

#230

Post by ChicagoDave »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #69

Whatever you think about javascript, I love the historic separation between content and interactivity. I dislike that so many static pages won't load without JS and that we're moving further in that direction. I hope the evolution towards "browser as OS" doesn't hurt the content vs interactivity separation. Could we ever lose the HTML centered model? That could mean we lose hackability and the ability to write extens…

A couple of takeaways:

I’d love to see a XAML implementation for wasm, because it’s cleaner than html/css.

Looking forward to .NET Core running in warm.

I could see hackability actually improving since data and API access could be well-defined.

I could see Publishers adopting wasm so their websites are more under their control.

But most of all, software development getting out of the scripting business, which has such a wide range of misuse that it becomes expensive and unwieldy to maintain.

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