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A comment on W3C recommends WebAssembly. Parent comment

Re:W3C recommends WebAssembly by shadowgovt on Sunday December 08, 2019 @09:01AM (#21735913)
The details of the complexities change, but the complexities are still there. You still need adoption by multiple parties, you still need to solve the application level challenges that HTTP solves (including, most importantly, secure communication over an open network), and you still need tooling to understand the protocol in flight, including its failure modes, to debug an application built atop the protocol. And you lose the utility of libraries and infrastructure built around using the other protocol.

The opportunity cost to do that with a brand new protocol instead of taking advantage of HTTP's flexibility to build new protocol atop HTTP is high.

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Re:W3C recommends WebAssembly by BlueTemplar on Monday December 09, 2019 @09:21AM (#21742832)
I can only be suspicious about too much complexity and stacking in what is essentially infrastructure - that should be reliable, and therefore have minimum complexity. Any initial opportunity costs are tiny when these protocols are used by billions of devices !
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Re:W3C recommends WebAssembly by shadowgovt on Monday December 09, 2019 @11:01AM (#21743712)
But they aren't. The vast majority of novel protocols never see a billion adopters. There are a handful that have; the email protocols are one, HTTP is another.

Nobody's stopping anyone from building new protocols... Except, of course, the fact that nobody wants to adopt a new protocol. But if someone does come up with an indispensable alternative to HTTP(s), it should find traction, right?

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Re:W3C recommends WebAssembly by BlueTemplar on Monday December 09, 2019 @12:03PM (#21744214)
Google and Facebook were very glad to "adopt" XMPP : https://salibra.com/p/the-death-of-jabber-8ea395e82f5b
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Re:W3C recommends WebAssembly by shadowgovt on Monday December 09, 2019 @01:14PM (#21744885)
XMPP is an excellent example of why existing flexible protocols push out novel protocols. When Google and Facebook wanted to improve the user experience of their XMPP clients, they encountered roadblocks in the fundamental design of the protocol itself. They finally reached a point where exiting the protocol was easier than improving it.
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Re:W3C recommends WebAssembly by BlueTemplar on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @07:05AM (#21751695)
"Exiting" doesn't seem to be the right word? How do we stop Google, who is currently "exiting" HTML ?
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Re:W3C recommends WebAssembly by shadowgovt on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @01:09PM (#21755004)
Should we? I thought you were making the argument that HTML was a bad fit for non-hyperTEXT content. From up-thread:

"Why use the HyperTEXT Transfer Protocol for things completely unrelated to text..."

If Google agrees with you, would we want to stop them?

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Re:W3C recommends WebAssembly by BlueTemplar on Tuesday December 10, 2019 @04:12PM (#21756914)
By "exiting", I mean Embracing-Extending-Extinguishing.
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