[troyvit]

They didn't suggest the web is doomed, just that more aspects of it are opaque. I don't think they're talking about every day users of the web either, but rather nascent developers.

The early web was a great equalizer. Anybody could study a little html, download an ftp manager, jump through a few procedural hoops and have a web page. After some studying and trial and error they could even build an interactive site.[1]

It's easy to miss all the potential of wasm when that's what you remember of the web. To me the amazing thing is that browsers will still work with the methods described above[2] but we're on the cusp of being able to do almost everything a full application environment can do.

That said, even though there will be plenty of OSS wasm tech, it'll still be more opaque to those of us who don't do compiled languages. It'll be a lot tougher to just fork the code and do something more creative with it.

[1] PHP used to stand for "Personal Home Page" and, as one of its founders put it, was created so that "any idtiot" could make an interactive site.

[2] https://t.mkws.sh/58bytes/

[maven29]

Are modern-day "no code" tools like Webflow not an acceptable equivalent?

We already lost any semblence of building from scratch in the mid-2000s with the emergence of gargantuan HTML templates and Wordpress/Drupal/PHPbb deployments with plugins and themes.

This is a direct result of people being held to higher standards and thus spending a lot more effort overriding the compositional and behaviour defaults of the user agent.

The modern-day iteration just optimizes for scaling up to tens of thousands of concurrent end-users on anemic hardware.

We have to accept the fact that personal webpages gave way to social network profile pages. This didn't happen overnight and there is zero demand for a hand-crafted presence on the web anymore.

[kragen]

No, an environment for writing new code is not any kind of equivalent for the ability to reverse-engineer existing code. Firebug and its clones are a much closer equivalent than anything like WebFLow.

[rektide]

Build from scratch is out of favor, but not necessarily that far off. Folks like Github & Youtube have very simple bottom-up webcomponent systems they use, rather than top doen frameworks. Existing concerns about bundling might be met by bundled http exchamges (webpackage).

I dont think "no code" is an aid. If anything it's pushing in the opposite direction: rather than a transparent approachable web medium, it suggests we need hyperadvanced tools that we really wont understand or have control over to synthesize web code. It's a simpler user experience, but a push away from notepad.exe webdev.

I wouldnt rush to make any conclusions about who or what has won, as a settled fact & case for all time. We havent had good ways to run online systems ourselves, versus hosted for us, and there's still lightyears to go but we're doing good things & finally maturing well. We're only a couple years into ActivityPub as an interchange format & growing many of the caoabilities & tools & systems, around all mimds of use cases, that will make throwong together a fair, interactabke competitive offering possoble. Social media has had huge huge investmemt poured into it, but we are in decent preteen years of growing up & owning the libre equivalents. We can assess demamd only after there is a visualizable state people can imagine; just having an isolated blog is not the equivalent to the well connected social media site, but these capabilities slowly arise. Follow the alpha geeks; this currently long phase will not be forever.

[fragmede]

JavaScript minifiers to obfuscate the code have been around pretty much since the language got popular, so that version of the web's been gone since about when Myspace lost to Facebook. Places like Glitch.com is trying to bring that back though.