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The problem was WebAssembly despite what people think isn't a JS replacement. WebAssembly isn't designed to go after DOM manipulation and the rest of the browse

by tmm84 5y ago

The problem was WebAssembly despite what people think isn't a JS replacement. WebAssembly isn't designed to go after DOM manipulation and the rest of the browser world (in short, think calculating physics and heavy number crunching instead of whether or not some input with id blah is blank). The best analogy I can give is this, imagine using Lua and calling of compiled code (C/C++/Rust/etc), this is the JS/WebAssembly way of doing things. Does the web browser (an application for reading documents written in hypertext), need to evolve? Or, has the web browser been asked to do more than it should and we need a new type of application? So much of the internet is based around the fact that the basics of the web browser can't change (don't break the web!). If the basics can't change then maybe the need for a new standard where the basics fit the application is required.

johnmaguire 5y ago
What would you change?
dmos62 5y ago
The browser has been a system-within-a-system for a long time now. That's a pretty big problem, because it's inefficient computation-wise and has very low interoperability with the host system, which has big implications. The user also has sort of an upside: the browser, being isolated on the host machine, is very portable. And, maybe safer, but I'd argue against this point, because a monolith is too hard to audit; if you want security and correctness you need many small components, not one huge one. But, those are user problems. Big vendors enjoy non-interoperability, because it lets them do user lock-in and have monopolies. That's also why we hardly have medium-sized vendors: only gigantic and minuscule. If I had a magic wand, - I'd make Web maximally interoperable, give an API to everything: look up Youtube recommendations or listen to Spotify programmatically or from the command line; - introduce legislation to forbid non-interoperable for-profit (or infrastructure-level) software; otherwise businesses are incentivized to make walled gardens and lock-in users; e.g. no more countless chat apps; - get rid of Javascript: it creates too many security and fingerprinting problems, and, if everything has an API, you don't need it; - break up the browser into a composition of smallest independent components possible; it will get you `apt install facebook-local-events`; - get rid of password-based authentication: what a horrible idea that was; - get rid of any client-side possibility to track or fingerprint users; if you're making choices about what services to use or how, those choices can be fingerprinted, depending on some other things, but that's another matter; the other party should not be exposed to what hardware or software or configuration you use or how you use your peripherals; - introduce consumer and competition protection laws to bring software out of the wild wild west in terms of legislation. I've more or less described the destruction of Web as we know it, but also a creation of something much better, in my eyes. Doesn't sound very feasible, but that's what I'd do if I had a magic wand.
- adminscoffee 5y ago
  has anyone attempted to create a separate standard yet?
  - dmos62 5y ago
    There's loads of document distribution alternatives, both classical (like Gopher) and modern (like Gemini). I'm not familiar with them.
pjmlp 5y ago
Except that is what is actually happening, despite what people like yourself wish, we are getting our Flash tooling back. Blazor, Unity, Uno, Qt, TeaVM, the list is only getting bigger and it will only stop if WebAssembly is removed from the browsers. Pandora box is open and the lid won't close.

by tmm84 5y ago

johnmaguire 5y ago

What would you change?

dmos62 5y ago

The browser has been a system-within-a-system for a long time now. That's a pretty big problem, because it's inefficient computation-wise and has very low interoperability with the host system, which has big implications. The user also has sort of an upside: the browser, being isolated on the host machine, is very portable. And, maybe safer, but I'd argue against this point, because a monolith is too hard to audit; if you want security and correctness you need many small components, not one huge one. But, those are user problems. Big vendors enjoy non-interoperability, because it lets them do user lock-in and have monopolies. That's also why we hardly have medium-sized vendors: only gigantic and minuscule. If I had a magic wand, - I'd make Web maximally interoperable, give an API to everything: look up Youtube recommendations or listen to Spotify programmatically or from the command line; - introduce legislation to forbid non-interoperable for-profit (or infrastructure-level) software; otherwise businesses are incentivized to make walled gardens and lock-in users; e.g. no more countless chat apps; - get rid of Javascript: it creates too many security and fingerprinting problems, and, if everything has an API, you don't need it; - break up the browser into a composition of smallest independent components possible; it will get you `apt install facebook-local-events`; - get rid of password-based authentication: what a horrible idea that was; - get rid of any client-side possibility to track or fingerprint users; if you're making choices about what services to use or how, those choices can be fingerprinted, depending on some other things, but that's another matter; the other party should not be exposed to what hardware or software or configuration you use or how you use your peripherals; - introduce consumer and competition protection laws to bring software out of the wild wild west in terms of legislation. I've more or less described the destruction of Web as we know it, but also a creation of something much better, in my eyes. Doesn't sound very feasible, but that's what I'd do if I had a magic wand.

adminscoffee 5y ago
has anyone attempted to create a separate standard yet?
- dmos62 5y ago
  There's loads of document distribution alternatives, both classical (like Gopher) and modern (like Gemini). I'm not familiar with them.

pjmlp 5y ago

Except that is what is actually happening, despite what people like yourself wish, we are getting our Flash tooling back. Blazor, Unity, Uno, Qt, TeaVM, the list is only getting bigger and it will only stop if WebAssembly is removed from the browsers. Pandora box is open and the lid won't close.