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WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

joeyh.name

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Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#61

Post by [deleted] »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #27
ghusto wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chromium, Safari, Firefox. And a longtail of half implemented alternatives. But the point is that there are 3 independent browser engines that are fairly widely used. Come on, you can't say that with a straight face. Safari exists because Apple has a monopoly on iOS traffic, and therefore an financially significant portion of mobile traffic. As soon as their rigid fingers are pried loose of that (which we're seeing…

>As soon as their rigid fingers are pried loose of that (which we're seeing the beginnings of), that's gone. It would be rather ironic if that leads to less browser choice and us all being slightly worse off.

[deleted]

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#62

Post by zfg »

JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

> The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash.

WebAssembly is different. WebAssembly brings every language to the web. Flash didn't.

WebAssembly can render to canvas and enable applications that compile to desktop, mobile, and the web. UI libraries like Avalonia do this: https://avaloniaui.net/

For example, here's C# implementation of Visual Basic 6 compiled to WebAssembly https://bandysc.github.io/AvaloniaVisualBasic6/ and source https://github.com/BAndysc/AvaloniaVisualBasic6

And a Solitaire demo https://solitaire.xaml.live/ and source https://github.com/AvaloniaUI/Solitaire

But WebAssembly applications can also manipulate the DOM like JavaScript. Example frameworks that do this:

- https://www.leptos.dev/

- https://dioxuslabs.com/

- https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/apps/aspnet/web-apps/blaz...

DOM access goes via JavaScript glue code for now. Eventually WebAssembly will get direct DOM access.

You can decide if you're making more of an application or more of a webpage. If you're making more of an application then why not just render to canvas with WebAssembly? And if you're making more of a webpage then why not have WebAssembly manipulate the DOM instead of JavaScript?

And for non-web uses, WebAssembly can be used in a plugin framework such as Extism:

https://extism.org/

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#63

Post by [deleted] »

nmfisher wrote: post #43
JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

This is exactly how Flutter (now) works on web - the browser loads a JS/WASM blob, and your app renders everything to a canvas - and you're right, almost everything you mention is problematic. There is a time and a place for that paradigm, but it's niche. The lack of SEO alone is usually enough to stop it in its tracks.

[deleted]

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#64

Post by chrismorgan »

nmfisher wrote: post #43
JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

This is exactly how Flutter (now) works on web - the browser loads a JS/WASM blob, and your app renders everything to a canvas - and you're right, almost everything you mention is problematic. There is a time and a place for that paradigm, but it's niche. The lack of SEO alone is usually enough to stop it in its tracks.

Flutter even had a DOM renderer which should in theory have fixed approximately all the issues (I don’t know for sure, I never knowingly encountered anything using it), but they’ve killed it off fairly recently, doubling down on the fundamentally unfixable direction that is the pure-canvas approach.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#65

Post by jcmontx »

The author implies the hardest part is HTML+CSS rendering + a JS engine. You still have to implement all of the IO and permissions etc, which I'd argue is still pretty hard. I'm a bit sceptic about this approach.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#66

Post by noduerme »

JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

I'm not sure why it can't be both. Given the current walled environment of app stores, web pages are a much better way to ship apps across platforms. That doesn't have to detract from the native function of www. Should you make your client's website an inaccessible blob of interpreted bytecode in 2025? Probably not. But can you embed an awesome game inside it with some weird custom UI? Why not!

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#67

Post by stakhanov »

Why is he writing that there are only 2 browser engines, soon to be down to 1? I thought there were three (Webkit, Blink, Gecko). I assume the "soon to be" part is referring to the expected demise of Gecko?

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#68

Post by noduerme »

nmfisher wrote: post #43
JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

This is exactly how Flutter (now) works on web - the browser loads a JS/WASM blob, and your app renders everything to a canvas - and you're right, almost everything you mention is problematic. There is a time and a place for that paradigm, but it's niche. The lack of SEO alone is usually enough to stop it in its tracks.

Hasn't SEO been dead for like 10 years? It's not as if there's a search engine you can get to the first page on without paying, so why waste ad dollars on stuffing SEO garbage in your page and chasing the algorithm when you can just buy ads, if that's what you need? And does anyone find anything anymore by doing generic web searches anyway?

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#69

Post by bartread »

codedokode wrote: post #45
neuroelectron wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "weaponization of complexity" is real—modern web standards are an endless labyrinth of APIs, performance optimizations, and security requirements. Large players like Google have the resources to dictate how the web evolves, while any newcomer faces insurmountable hurdles in achieving compatibility, security, and speed. Even major tech companies have tried and failed (e.g., Microsoft ditching EdgeHTML for Chromium…

You put the blame on Google but isn't it your fault, people who get excited every time a new feature gets added to web standards, and developers who use it? Like CSS masonry, or WebRTC, or web components with shadow DOM? Features like this get lot of upvotes here.

This is the truth of it: if people chose Firefox, or another alternative, over Chrome then Google would have less power to impose its will on the web. This would be a good thing.

Google’s power on the web doesn’t simply come from having lots of money and resources - see, as examples, any of the multitude of Google’s failures and shuttered products - but mostly comes from its reach.

“Everybody” uses Chrome. If that were no longer true, progress on the web could return to a more open an collaborative model.

Anyone can help that happen simply by switching to Firefox, as I did four or five years ago.

Re: WASM Wayland Web (WWW)

#70

Post by incrudible »

zfg wrote: post #62
JimDabell wrote: post #36

The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. They treated the web browser like it was just a way to run executables in a window. Nothing worked right. Bookmarks, search engines, command-line tools, user preferences for font size, user scripts, view source, right-click menus, ad blockers, auto-translations, user stylesheets, assistive tools, bookmarklets, deep links……

> The web had this before briefly. Back in the 90s and 00s, some people just wanted to use Flash. WebAssembly is different. WebAssembly brings every language to the web. Flash didn't. WebAssembly can render to canvas and enable applications that compile to desktop, mobile, and the web. UI libraries like Avalonia do this: https://avaloniaui.net/ For example, here's C# implementation of Visual Basic 6 compiled to WebAs…

…and yet we still do not have the streamlined authoring experience we had with Flash. The stuff you show is just a crappier way to write boring GUIs with some other language for which you need to download the runtime. Flash let many more people create far more fun stuff than any Web standard ever did.

People forget that Flash also brought C/C++ to the web at some point, but besides some flashy demos, nobody really cared.

The problem is that all this choice creates fragmentation, you have dozens of platforms within a platform on top of another platform. Web APIs and Javascript may suck in many ways, but at least the are a common denominator.

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