I've said the same, but you just know somebody comes along and says "If we render our entire site into a <canvas> it'll make ad blocking more difficult," and then poof there goes the last 20 years of work on accessibility.

We can port webkit to wasm, so our developers won't have to deal with browser inconsistencies anymore :)

Yeah, and V8, so we could just write JavaScript again and wouldn't have to deal with WASM. With a bit support from WASM and a few tweaks to V8 it could run near native JavaScript speed. Let's call it JavaScript paravirtualization.

Interpreters can go a long way, but JIT code generation is required for really fast dynamic language implementation. That's quite a bit off for WebAssembly: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FutureFeat...

If you strip out the legacy cruft it should be much faster. Reduce it to just the components used!

If I understood properly: yes, I do share the bitterness.

<troll> Look at us introduce this great new lang! It will potentially get rid of 99.99% of the current web developers and prevent any future script kiddies from getting in the game!

Behold the speed of our sealed box environment little jimmy!

Stay tuned for next weeks episode of Tech%20Elitism where we cover DRM for the web and public discourse policing!

Oy, that has to be the most depressing thing I've read all day.

Agreed. There will also be the "This will prevent scrapers" excuse. Whatever the silly rationalization for all-Flash websites was will be invoked, as well.

Most ad blocking is about intercepting specific urls, which can work at a layer below javascript.

They can also do server side ads and make the url indistinguishable from another image asset. They haven't, so it isn't 'dire' enough yet.

Good luck for that site getting indexed by Google ;)

Just like with AJAX sites, Google will simply support it.

But writing third-party search engines will become even more impossible.

OCR is really not that hard to do.

For english. Do it reliably for many 27 languages, with many different fonts, and the results are useless.

Even Google’s OCR utility can’t reliably detect German Umlaute in fancy fonts.

HTML is also much a more convenient encoding for content than writing on the canvas. It's fully declarative¹ and everything.

Yet, plenty of people already prefer to send you a black page and manually write everything on the DOM's document. I certainly do not understand them, but they are way too common.

1 - You just write your content, and it's there. There isn't more declarative than that.

HTML isn't great for application code. That's the issue, and anyone targeting WASM and canvas would be looking to recreate desktop apps on the web, not traditional websites.

Yes, it's bad for applications. But that does not explain why people send their text based pages as javascript.

> But that does not explain why people send their text based pages as javascript.

Probably because they're using front-end javascript frameworks which do that, and because they were taught that this is the best and most efficient way to render anything on the web. No one wants to make a special case for text because it seems inelegant.

But it's not the best and most efficient way to render everything. If you have a mostly static site, you don't need the front-end framework.