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> Well, in fairness web-based applications (including Electron ones running locally) break most of the inspectability benefits that came before, at least on the

> Well, in fairness web-based applications (including Electron ones running locally) break most of the inspectability benefits that came before, at least on the Windows platform. eg. I used to be able to programmatically grab hWnd's (like Spy++ does), and manipulate the forms of an app. Apps used to show up as one (or two) simple processes with rich instrumentation metrics in tools like Resource Monitor. --- I disagree pretty hard with this sentiment. Yes, it's harder to programmatically interact with some of the browser features from outside of the browser. Programmatic interaction with basically any application that isn't yours is getting harder across every operating system as security becomes more important. That doesn't really change that introspection of the source that makes up a displayed site was easy and approachable. I can look at the css/html/js. Further, all of those resources are contained in files intended to be opened and looked at by humans (they're human readable text). This is my biggest issue with WASM. You're literally back at reading assembly again. And while that's possible, and there is tooling that can help - it's just not the same as being able to right-click on something, alter a couple of attributes in human readable words, hit enter and see that change.

josephg 4y ago
> This is my biggest issue with WASM. You're literally back at reading assembly again. And while that's possible, and there is tooling that can help - it's just not the same as being able to right-click on something, alter a couple of attributes in human readable words, hit enter and see that change. WASM on its own isn't the problem. WASM just lets you use another language to replace javascript. When you right click on something in a browser and alter human-readable attributes, you're usually messing with CSS and HTML. Any half decent web UI framework should pass HTML and CSS to the browser in order to render the UI. Thats just as true with wasm frameworks as it is with javascript frameworks. The problem in this example is that the wasm code is bundling its own UI library that is trying (badly) to replace the browser's layout engine. All the browser can see is a bunch of drawing calls to an html canvas. Thats not the fault of wasm. Its just this UI library, which isn't really designed for the web.
revelio 4y ago
Most web apps don't use human readable text. It's all heavily minified and the textual nature is just pure downside: slower and harder to parse than binary, more bloated, harder to implement.

josephg 4y ago

> This is my biggest issue with WASM. You're literally back at reading assembly again. And while that's possible, and there is tooling that can help - it's just not the same as being able to right-click on something, alter a couple of attributes in human readable words, hit enter and see that change. WASM on its own isn't the problem. WASM just lets you use another language to replace javascript. When you right click on something in a browser and alter human-readable attributes, you're usually messing with CSS and HTML. Any half decent web UI framework should pass HTML and CSS to the browser in order to render the UI. Thats just as true with wasm frameworks as it is with javascript frameworks. The problem in this example is that the wasm code is bundling its own UI library that is trying (badly) to replace the browser's layout engine. All the browser can see is a bunch of drawing calls to an html canvas. Thats not the fault of wasm. Its just this UI library, which isn't really designed for the web.

revelio 4y ago

Most web apps don't use human readable text. It's all heavily minified and the textual nature is just pure downside: slower and harder to parse than binary, more bloated, harder to implement.