I think you're possibly underestimating the cost and difficulty of developing apps using low level code (or whatever web assembly is, lower level than html+css

I think you're possibly underestimating the cost and difficulty of developing apps using low level code (or whatever web assembly is, lower level than html+css anyway). its technically difficult enough that I think its main use case will be for somewhat large and well funded companies that have the budget and expertise to deliver a fairly complex client side app that has behavior and design that is not easily done in existing web technologies. for example, all the stuff that people attempt to do now on HTML canvases seems like a likely candidate to be replaced by web assembly apps. this could lead to an era of high performance streaming apps with pretty impressive graphics capabilities. basically just a huge upgrade to emscripten, right? I'm just not seeing this as being a real threat/competitor with traditional document based content on the web. I don't think that's going anywhere and I don't think web assembly interferes with that on any significant level.