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> I'm looking forward to that day and when it comes. That is the day where the open web is a little closer to dead. Possibly a lot closer. The move away from

> I'm looking forward to that day and when it comes. That is the day where the open web is a little closer to dead. Possibly a lot closer. The move away from flash was a move towards empowering users. That did cost a little bit for developers, as they had worse tools to control the experience, but that also meant that it was more likely (eventually) that the experience they did develop would work in more cases. How many flash sites dealt with different size displays well, or dynamically resized and flowed correctly? How many worked with screen readers? That's one of the benefits we've reaped by pushing the framework to the browser, and using open standards. Items that traditionally would haven't gotten much attention were also seen as important, and saw advances. I don't know how much some random React-like framework that just draws on the canvas would focus on screen reader support, but I suspect it wouldn't be high on their priority list. And even if it is on theirs, what about the 5 other main competitors that will be sharing market space with it? I just hope that the sites that opt for these types of system are few and far between, and have specific operating needs that make it worthwhile. I think it's good that we can, but usually we shouldn't.

Bizarro 8y ago
WebAssembly can't close the open web anymore than it's already closed today. The vast majority of JS in the browser today is minified jibberish. WebAssembly doesn't take away HTML and CSS.
- kbenson 8y ago
  WebAssembly makes it much more feasible to implement your own layout and display engine on top of a canvas element.
  - Bizarro 8y ago
    Why more feasible?
    - kbenson 8y ago
      Because an application like that is both computationally expensive and expensive to ship as a runtime. WebAssembly can provide benefits in both cases (WASM binaries can be close an order of magnitude smaller than equivalent JS code, in select cases), and is quick to start. As a simple example, it's not impossible that Adobe could literally take the flash VM code, compile to WASM with emscripten, and ship it along with an SWF file and a little setup code. This completely bypasses the need for a browser plugin for flash. Now, I suspect the flash VM might be large enough to make this noticeable, but it probably wouldn't be hard for Adobe to streamline it, and then re-purpose a lot of those tools used to build flash that everyone loves to rave about... I believe there are financial incentives for this to happen, therefore I think it's only a matter of time until it does.
eridius 8y ago
Using WebAssembly + WebGL/Canvas/whatever to basically replicate Flash is perfectly fine, for games. Using Flash for games was never a problem. Flash was a problem when it was used for non-game things. And I suppose it's possible someone could use Unity exporting to WebAssembly + WebGL to produce a crappy restaurant webpage (to name one common Flash offense), but it doesn't really seem all that likely.
- kbenson 8y ago
  Yeah, games is fine. So it some sort of demo (in the demo scene sense), or video player interface, honestly. But I saw far to many flash websites in the past, because sometimes people really just want a powerpoint presentation for a website because they have a "vision", and usability is a foreign concept. I think it's highly likely some service like Squarespace will deploy sites using something like this, because it both lets them more finely control some aspects and features, as well as make it harder for people to move. All marketed under "website plagiarism protection" or something similar. "Want to stop scraping? Just use this middleware package..."
  - eridius 8y ago
    WebAssembly doesn't really provide any more protection than just highly-obfuscated/minimized JavaScript.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      That depend on how dynamic the site is. If your site is implemented on Canvas and doesn't even allow text selection, copying the site to make a competitor would be harder, as would scraping price/inventory lists, or any sort of scraping. That's both the selling point and the problem.

Bizarro 8y ago

WebAssembly can't close the open web anymore than it's already closed today. The vast majority of JS in the browser today is minified jibberish. WebAssembly doesn't take away HTML and CSS.

kbenson 8y ago
WebAssembly makes it much more feasible to implement your own layout and display engine on top of a canvas element.
- Bizarro 8y ago
  Why more feasible?
  - kbenson 8y ago
    Because an application like that is both computationally expensive and expensive to ship as a runtime. WebAssembly can provide benefits in both cases (WASM binaries can be close an order of magnitude smaller than equivalent JS code, in select cases), and is quick to start. As a simple example, it's not impossible that Adobe could literally take the flash VM code, compile to WASM with emscripten, and ship it along with an SWF file and a little setup code. This completely bypasses the need for a browser plugin for flash. Now, I suspect the flash VM might be large enough to make this noticeable, but it probably wouldn't be hard for Adobe to streamline it, and then re-purpose a lot of those tools used to build flash that everyone loves to rave about... I believe there are financial incentives for this to happen, therefore I think it's only a matter of time until it does.

eridius 8y ago

Using WebAssembly + WebGL/Canvas/whatever to basically replicate Flash is perfectly fine, for games. Using Flash for games was never a problem. Flash was a problem when it was used for non-game things. And I suppose it's possible someone could use Unity exporting to WebAssembly + WebGL to produce a crappy restaurant webpage (to name one common Flash offense), but it doesn't really seem all that likely.

kbenson 8y ago
Yeah, games is fine. So it some sort of demo (in the demo scene sense), or video player interface, honestly. But I saw far to many flash websites in the past, because sometimes people really just want a powerpoint presentation for a website because they have a "vision", and usability is a foreign concept. I think it's highly likely some service like Squarespace will deploy sites using something like this, because it both lets them more finely control some aspects and features, as well as make it harder for people to move. All marketed under "website plagiarism protection" or something similar. "Want to stop scraping? Just use this middleware package..."
- eridius 8y ago
  WebAssembly doesn't really provide any more protection than just highly-obfuscated/minimized JavaScript.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    That depend on how dynamic the site is. If your site is implemented on Canvas and doesn't even allow text selection, copying the site to make a competitor would be harder, as would scraping price/inventory lists, or any sort of scraping. That's both the selling point and the problem.