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Comment by Figs | Hacker News Reader

Which is a terrible usability nightmare waiting to happen...

Seriously, DON'T do this. This breaks ctrl-f. This is unlikely to work well for people who need to enlarge text or enhance contrast due to vision impairment. This breaks screen readers. This will probably break most site archive navigators, so your content is lost to history (e.g. wayback machine). This will probably prevent Google from indexing your site, killing your page ranking and driving away potential customers. Even if you re-implement all the things you think it will break, you'll find that your users have things set up in ways you'd never considered...

Just, don't. Please don't do that.

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Welcome to the Modern Web. Not sure if you noticed, but most web developers don't give a flying fuck about usability (despite what their company blogs say). A broken navigation is something you encounter daily on the Internet. CTRL+F still kinda works - it can scroll you to the more-less right area of the screen, but quite often the text you search for isn't highlighted anymore. Right-click is routinely broken (most recently with stupid-ass "social sharing" context menus). Copy-paste is routinely broken with stupid inventions that alter the contents of your clipboard in hope you don't notice the extra URL in there. Modern websites turn your computer into a frying pan with the shit ton of JS they execute, most of which is not only unnecessary, but also actively hostile. And/or mine cryptocoins, because it's almost 2018, so we need more dumb inventions.

It's a long topic, but basically boils down to companies being greedy and not giving a fuck about their users, and web developers being too busy chasing shiny to stop and care about actually providing value to users.

> you'll find that your users have things set up in ways you'd never considered...

Web companies don't care. They aim for the majority, which is users with popular browsers on default settings, without ad blockers and any plugins.

Too late, WebAssembly is already here.

I really think it will bring Flash like web sites back, and browser vendors are the ones actually pushing it.

The wheels are already in motion, with everyone trying to port their favorite language or VM into WebAssembly.

For example, today it is Qt WebGL Streaming, tomorrow it might just run directly from WebAssembly.

http://blog.qt.io/blog/2017/07/07/qt-webgl-streaming-merged/

It will be up to those frameworks to provide usability support, like WPF does for Windows.

WebAssembly doesn't change this. There's nothing preventing people from doing this with javascript (plain or asm.js flavored) and canvas/webGL, and yet no one does. It just doesn't make a lot of sense.

Try to disable JavaScript and see how much of the modern Web you are able to enjoy, even on sites which are supposed to display static text.

So? My point is that most who relies on client-side code to render apps, does so in a way that integrates nicely with the browser. Most JS apps render html, they don't draw to a canvas. They could do that, but it would break a lot of functionality that people expect for a program that runs in a browser. This won't change with webasm. It will just make such pages load (and maybe perform) faster.

The point is that wasm doesn't change this; wasm won't make it 'worse'.

Actually,

"Add support for WebAssembly as target platform for Qt

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-63917

> This will probably prevent Google from indexing your site, killing your page ranking and driving away potential customers.

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if Google used some sort of AI to recognise the resulting images of text. What this would do is make it exponentially more difficult to start a search competitor to Google. Which might explain why Google is all-in on WebAssembly …

There are reasonable people, who would only do this for applications (such as games or maps), and never for documents. Then there are those who require JavaScript for simple walls of texts.

Are you suggesting that content providers shouldn't be able to control who can select/copy/save the text on their websites? What are you, a communist?

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