>Because people will take it and say "Hey, with WebAssembly I can rip out the entire DOM and roll my own layout and text rendering directly to a canvas like som

>Because people will take it and say "Hey, with WebAssembly I can rip out the entire DOM and roll my own layout and text rendering directly to a canvas like some sort of game engine! By avoiding standard webpage structures, we can make our ads harder to block!" You say that as if it was a bad thing. There is two kind of content (relevant to this diacussion at least) that get served trough the web - documents/media and apps. DOM/HTML is ok for the former it's a horrible hack in the latter and most of your objections to custom gui also apply to DOM gui frameworks + they are dog slow and annoying to use. There is room in the middle (webapps) but there is definately a class of apps out there that just don't fit in to the DOM/HTML and get zero benefits from it outside of delivery which is why they get done that way.