[linuxontheweb]

I don't see the "binaryification" of the web platform happening any time soon (if ever). The web is (and should remain) fundamentally about the transmission of documents. Javascript+DOM allows for the dynamic updating of said documents, and this is what the main thread (asynchronous event loop) is all about. For all "heavy lifting," the logic should go into worker threads, where there isn't any DOM access anyway. I think a decent rule of thumb is that WASM modules should generally only be used in these kinds of off-the-event-loop types of worker threads.

(See https://linuxontheweb.github.io/ for my implementation of a new kind of web application platform where these kinds of ideas can start becoming a reality.)

[awongh]

I like the idea of the web / js / DOM being for documents, but if you look at all the new browser javascript APIs it’s clear we’re constantly moving further and further away from documents. Once developers have all these tools available they build things and the cycle continues towards what seems like a pretty complete application runtime environment within the browser.

[linuxontheweb]

As long as web applications are necessarily embedded inside of SCRIPT elements, which are themselves necessarily embedded inside of HTML elements, then documents will always have priority over applications.

[davexunit]

There are basically two variants of the web: The document web and the application web. I think there's space for both.