[JoshTriplett]

> "The web hasn't fallen apart" for sighted users. Those non-semantic, unusable-to-screen-reader sites are in fact an accessibility disaster for blind users, who can find it nearly impossible to use some sites.

I'm saying that div-itis is possible today, but it's a bad idea, and as far as I can tell many new sites still use semantic markup when available.

Along the same lines, I would expect that even if people implement a web engine in wasm, many will still use semantic markup.

That said, I agree that people don't pay enough attention to accessibility, and should. But I don't think wasm or wasm-based rendering engines will make that worse.

[0x0]

Even if you use only divs, the actual text is there in UTF-8 to parse out of the DOM, today.

If you go all-in on wasm to do "your own rendering", external software won't know where to find a "DOM" or how to understand it, unless some other kind of reinvented HTML-for-a-wasm-rendering-engine-defacto-standard is invented?

(This is more a rant against "let's reinvent html/css in canvas" rather against a VM-based javascript replacement in general. Even though the latter sounds a bit terrible as well for the open web; imagine what the web would have looked like if .js never existed, and a flash/java .swf/.jar engine was the only way to do scripting in a webpage.)

[mkozlows]

What I can tell you for sure is that most sites are accessible to the extent that HTML makes accessibility the default, and the instant people start doing stuff that's not accessible-by-default (JS checkbox widgets, for instance), it almost always gets ignored and dropped.

So when you start talking about ignore-the-DOM stuff, my strong suspicion is that it would all be completely and totally inaccessible.