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by derefr 1043 days ago
> And I couldn't help thinking "Why would people have complicated stacks to create Web 2.0 apps for the Google Web, when they have this?", in other words an opportunity to break out of the browser straitjacket.

Perhaps because they still believe in the promise of Web 1.0, where their app is a graceful-enhancement over an initial server-rendered document, that can be easily worked with at a DOM level by any HTML scraper, easily baked to a PDF and printed, easily re-laid-out for better readability just by changing the browser font size, easily text-to-speech'ed (including ARIA roles, alt text, etc), easily re-styled with a user-agent stylesheet, easily intermediated by browser extensions, and so forth.

I've yet to see a WASM-driven web application that's any less opaque to these technologies than a Flash or ActiveX applet would be.
2 comments
rikarendsmp 1042 days ago
Browser apps are not only about these usecases, which are mostly a document-use-of-DOM feature. Which is fine for certain cases. However for a synthesiser UI, IDE, designtools or even a SDXL explorer flowgraph i don't really care about that. You want fast UI, with threads available to make workloads not hiccup the system. And thats what we're building with makepad. I found the stranglehold that HTML put on application developers over the years to be so demotivating i almost quit building applications that ran in a browser entirely. But luckily now we have wasm+rust+webgl/gpu and things can happen again.
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rapnie 1043 days ago
All fair points. But there's no reason that these things, like ARIA standard, aren't added. That is independent of WebAssembly standard. I did not mention "Google Web" for no reason. The "promise of Web 1.0" in terms of being open is near dead with Google DRM's and the browser oligopoly and all that jazz.

Also mentioned Web 2.0 for a reason. The "cram full-blown app into browsers" web, that uses Rube Goldberg machines behind the scenes. Joking aside, these (btw, also opaque) dynamic applications can hugely benefit from a new paradigm. While the Web itself can go back more to its original 1.0 roots of hypermedia, and allowing more and simpler browsers to wield its content.

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