4 ms·

One way or another, the endgame is going to be websites which are nothing but a fullscreen WebGL canvas driven by webassembly. Things will steadily devolve for

One way or another, the endgame is going to be websites which are nothing but a fullscreen WebGL canvas driven by webassembly. Things will steadily devolve for users from that point. Then we’ll need about ten years for the next generation of hypermedia to surface, which hopefully won’t have Turing-complete scripting on principle. But I’m not sure whether developers are smart enough to avoid repeating the same mistakes again and again…

aendruk 4y ago
That may just be the day I stop using the web. I can picture it now: Me, neo-luddite, weathered and bitter, strung between the maw of capitalism and the precious tranquility of my crafted world.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  At least you'll be safe from the blipverts.
postalrat 4y ago
Why a canvas with webassembly? Just a single video element with everything rendered on the server gives them the most control.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  Stadia and GeForce Now already does this. But I don't think this will be the business model of the Web at large. Server costs would be too high. Webassembly blobs with WebGL gives you the sweet spot by offloading the compute cost to the user while stripping them practically all of their freedoms.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
That already happened with Flash. It took 20 years to kill it but it's finally dead.
- userbinator 4y ago
  ...and now its replacement is back with a vengeance. At least when Flash was common, full-Flash sites were not really as common as JS-only SPAs today, and it was easy to just block embedded plugins by default and only enable when necessary for some particular interactive element. In other words, plugins provided a clear separation between the "document browser" and the "very interactive", but with today's "JS everywhere", that distinction is getting more blurred and difficult to tease apart.

4 ms·

One way or another, the endgame is going to be websites which are nothing but a fullscreen WebGL canvas driven by webassembly. Things will steadily devolve for

by aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

aendruk 4y ago
That may just be the day I stop using the web. I can picture it now: Me, neo-luddite, weathered and bitter, strung between the maw of capitalism and the precious tranquility of my crafted world.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  At least you'll be safe from the blipverts.
postalrat 4y ago
Why a canvas with webassembly? Just a single video element with everything rendered on the server gives them the most control.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  Stadia and GeForce Now already does this. But I don't think this will be the business model of the Web at large. Server costs would be too high. Webassembly blobs with WebGL gives you the sweet spot by offloading the compute cost to the user while stripping them practically all of their freedoms.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
That already happened with Flash. It took 20 years to kill it but it's finally dead.
- userbinator 4y ago
  ...and now its replacement is back with a vengeance. At least when Flash was common, full-Flash sites were not really as common as JS-only SPAs today, and it was easy to just block embedded plugins by default and only enable when necessary for some particular interactive element. In other words, plugins provided a clear separation between the "document browser" and the "very interactive", but with today's "JS everywhere", that distinction is getting more blurred and difficult to tease apart.