W3C recommends WebAssembly

One of the reasons of the downfall of Flash were those tiny Flash sites in the middle of a full screen page when we suddenly moved from small screens to 1366x768 or better. Many sites didn't have the resources to upgrade and started looking like something 100 years old.

>In the browser, text is your pixel. Of course you are welcome to build things on top of that with CSS, images, and Canvas. More to the point, I'm not saying that 95% of the time you should abandon your design and make a minimalist terminal interface -- I'm saying that for 95% of the phone apps and native apps I see, HTML would be fine. There is a pretty good chance the design someone has come up with is already representable in pure text, and they just haven't thought hard enough about how to do it. I'm not saying design everything minimalist, I'm saying your design is probably already a lot more minimalist than you think, and it probably wouldn't be that hard to separate content from pixel-positioning and style for most apps.

This is your opinion, and your opinion deserves to be fulfilled. My opinion is that the web is a multimedia platform that can do combinatorial designs where text motion and visualizations can be combined into something like this:

https://neal.fun/deep-sea/

In my opinion what you see as 95% of all user interfaces is largely a because HTML and CSS are the rendering target not the other way around. There are less games and those types of UI interfaces on web browsers because HTML + CSS is bad for doing those things.

So if we have different opinions what's the best way to fulfill both? Libraries. One library for your text based philosophy and one for mine. The lower level technology should be agnostic to both of our opinions. What I don't like is having to submit myself to your design philosophy and write my canvas library on top of HTML + CSS.

webassembly makes logic language agnostic on the front end. It's time to do the same for the "render target"

This might actually be a great direction to go.

I don't think there's any particular reason that WASM has to be more obfuscated than JS. You can already throw a WASM file into a bytecode-to-text translator which is about as useful as deobfuscating a minified JS file, and I assume decompiling/debugging tools will only get better in the future.

For a long time now, I've been thinking of a future where your OS properly isolates all the programs that run on it and even gives us the ability to have direct control over how programs interact with the rest of the system. OS's seem too mired in backwards-compatibility requirements to make big changes like that any time soon, but that's basically the way our browsers already work. Download some code, and execute it (relatively) safely because it's sandboxed from the rest of the system. Our browsers are basically the new OS, and this time around we can do it right using what we learned from OS's (and hopefully backport these browser features into the next generation of OS's).

For example, an app asks for a filesystem handle. You can hand it one that refers to a real location on your OS fs, or you can hand it a completely virtual fs that won't affect anything else on the system.

Whenever an app asks for a resource, being able to hand it a virtual or sandboxed one instead is a huge gain for user-control.

> because you literally can't build a good looking dropdown with normal HTML.

I want to push back against this in particular, not only because I think it does HTML/CSS a disservice, but because I've maintained codebases that took this approach and they're really bad to work with. You're trading a little bit of CSS annoyance for constant positioning/z-index errors -- and you'll need to update your positions whenever your page scrolls or a component grows... there are just so many ways for this to go wrong, and there's always an edge case that developers miss.

Nothing is absolute, but most of the time the proper way to do something like a custom dropdown selector or tooltip is to semantically group it with the component it's attached to, and then at most absolute-position one element to center it relative to its parent.

  
    
    
      Option One
      Option Two
    
  

  .Input { position: relative; }
  .Input__Options { position: absolute; /* etc */ }
  .Input__Options--hidden { display: none; }

I don't like everything about CSS, there are a number of problematic design choices in the language -- particularly specificity. I also wouldn't necessarily be against a new primitive for scoping CSS to specific DOM trees. But annoyances aside, overall CSS is pretty great, and on net the apps I maintain that make heavy use of CSS are easier to maintain and less buggy than the apps I work on that try to use JS code to accomplish the same tasks. Obviously that's anecdotal.

Again, this doesn't mean you can't compose your CSS in JS. But separation of concerns is not for you. The point is to let me as a user override or ignore your styles, and to keep your styles away from your core content. When you spit out HTML and CSS, you are spitting out an application interface.

You're really worried about where you write your CSS, and I couldn't care less. I just want devs to render clean styles that I can work with as a user, and to stop using JS mouseover events to poorly recreate a hover selector.

Because otherwise it's not a website?

"By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.

As the web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.

He explains: “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

So, Tim and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever."

Can you see how rude it is to not do the same ?