[86J8oyZv]

This is the endgame of putting JS/programmability (rather than just markup) in browsers at all. HTML and CSS are great for formatting documents. But, in spite of years of jQueries, Angulars, Reacts, Vues, and 10M other frameworks being implemented, HTML+CSS+JS is frankly awful for developing applications. Business needs have made us push them to be okay for enough form entry to collect credit card numbers and do billing stuff, but even then every step forward comes with a few steps back.

An optimistic take is that this should mean we get better web apps and less JS garbage on web pages where we just want to read something and there’s no justification for having code execute when you visit the document. That’s the intent of WebAssembly and it makes sense.

The reality is that the NYTs of the world will continue to put JS garbage all over pages that have no business executing any code. But WebAssembly doesn’t really have any bearing on that. It offers the opportunity to make things better. The organizations who seek to profit off the web and make it worse for the rest of us will still do so, with or without WebAssembly.

[endisneigh]

I hear this take a lot. Why is HTML + JS awful for developing applications?

[easrng]

It wasn't designed to, it grew bit by bit with new features gradually being tacked on, so the APIs are inconsistent (For example,NodeList, HTMLCollection, and Array all have different methods and naming conventions) and poorly designed.