[rob74]

> The only way it really fell short is in the way that a lot of people were predicting that it would become a sort of total replacement for JS+HTML+CSS for building web apps.

I for one hope that doesn't happen anytime soon. YouTube or Spotify could theoretically switch to Wasm drawing to a canvas right now (with a lot of development effort), but that would make the things that are currently possible thanks to the DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.

[gf000]

> DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.

This is a cat mouse fight, and Facebook already does some ultra-shady stuff like rendering a word as a list of randomly ordered divs for each character, and only using CSS to display in a readable way.

But it can't be made impossible, at the worst case we can always just capture the screen and use an AI to recognize ads, wasting a lot of energy. The same is true for cheating in video games and many forms of online integrity problems - I can just hire a good player who would play in my place, and no technology could recognize that.

[palata]

> ultra-shady stuff like rendering a word as a list of randomly ordered divs for each character, and only using CSS to display in a readable way.

I wonder how much the developers writing that are being paid to be complete assholes.

[strangegecko]

I can't speak for FB. But I know a local (non-US) real estate company which does crap like this (they also love to disable right click and detect when browser tools are open and programmatically close the tab/page when that happens), and they're not paying much. I'm guessing it's double of minimum wage, which isn't high here.

[ljm]

Knowing what total comp is like for those companies, I'm sure Facebook more than exceeded the price one might put on ethics.

I've personally resigned from positions for less and it hasn't cost me much comfort in life (maybe some career progression perhaps but, meh).

[pxc]

Shouldn't this kind of thing be illegal as a matter of accessibility?

[CyberDildonics]

Can you link to the law you're talking about?

[pxc]

I'm not making a legal argument.

If someone else would like to make one, though, I'd be happy to read it.

[panzi]

Since this is about something nobody wants to see (ads) my guess would be that it might be legal here.

[CyberDildonics]

Shouldn't this kind of thing be illegal

I'm not making a legal argument.

Why would someone else make a legal argument for you? You're the one saying it should be illegal.

[smallnix]

> no technology could recognize that.

Perhaps require monitoring of the arm muscle electrical signals, build a profile, match the readings to the game actions and check that the profile matches the advertised player

[jfengel]

I think that's hilarious. Can you point me to some documentation on that? Such as why they'd do it?

(To make scraping and automation harder, perhaps?)

[ivell]

I suspect this will be coming soon. For ad-driven companies, having an opaque deployment which would prevent ad-blockers would be ideal.

However ads still need to be delivered over the net so there is still some way to block them (without resorting to router/firewall level blocking).

[creata]

They'd be raked over the coals for the lack of accessibility, I hope.

[javcasas]

That's like the mafia being raked over the coals for not having accessibility ramps for wheelchairs in their clandestine distilleries.

Not gonna happen.

[lynx97]

You are probably right. What will happen is that ad-blocker people will indirectly kill accessibility. That would make a lot of sense in this world. Its a reoccuring pattern. Spam killed a part of accessibility indirectly via CAPTCHA. And "it is my god-given right to block ads of free services I use" people will indirectly finally kill accessibility for good, now that we have <canvas>.

[lynx97]

Add Accessibility to that list. Morally speaking, it is likely more important then scraping and ad-blockers.

[willtemperley]

Yes, however I reject the idea that a full WASM app would be strictly worse for accessibility in the long term. Native UI frameworks do have accessibility APIs and browsers could implement something similar.

I see it as an opportunity to do better.

[lynx97]

So far, huge rewrites/rearchitecturings typically worsened the end user experience from an a11y POV. I even know people personally who have lost their job of 20 years because their employer decided to redo their IT, "accidentally" leaving the disabled employee behind. It is naiv to think a big rewrite will NOT make things much worse for years.

[m00dy]

>>possible thanks to the DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.

lol, you can scrape anything visible on your screen.

[p_l]

multiple web apps already work by rendering all to canvas - for example Google Docs and O365