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The web long ago became not only a document store but also a thin client platform for distributing full client applications to end users. That cat is out of the bag and is not going to be stuffed back in.

WASM is really just a cleaner, faster, more elegant way of running alternative languages to JavaScript in the browser. It replaces transpilers that turned languages like Java or Go into ugly basically machine code JavaScript blobs. It will save bandwidth and improve performance but otherwise doesn't change much. Note that transpiled and uglified JavaScript is already "closed source," so nothing changes there. Anything can be obfuscated.

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I do see your point!

I am however scared that HTML will go the way of Gopher. Why would anyone care to maintain boring hypertext documents when we can have app of the day. Marketing departments everywhere tend to turn the web into Blinkenlights.

How many support documents of more than 15-20 years ago are you able to still find using the old links? So many sites are working as dumb front-ends for a database.

The information retrieval and persistence over time is not something many worries about.

The cat is for sure out of the bag. I just hope what was still can survive.

>I am however scared that HTML will go the way of Gopher. Why would anyone care to maintain boring hypertext documents when we can have app of the day.

JS or Wasm can't create documents by themselves, they still need a DOM. Even if it's a 2D canvas or some WebGL canvas, it's still a DOM element. Or even if it's just an iframe that loads some blob, on the top level it's still a DOM element. And as such it can be inspected and controlled.

> And as such it can be inspected and controlled

Not if the content is decrypted by EME that's not fully controlled by the browser.

I think marketing departments would quickly notice that most crawlers won't execute all the fancy Blinkenlights.

I would assume that it will take a while for tooling in any other language to get to a javascript level. I think WASM will mainly be support for the latter. Do some excessive calculations.... and yeah, excessive Blinkenlights.

You'd be surprised, marketing departments generally do not have a clue about that specific type of thing. Hell eBay's operations apparently doesn't from my experience. It's incredibly easy to game marketing, and internet marketing is mindlessly easy without the invasive stalking.

> The cat is for sure out of the bag. I just hope what was still can survive.

I hope so too, but as a member of predatory and territorial species, the cat will most likely keep on killing everything else around it.

Yes, but only for about four hours a day, because naps.

Exactly. Well said.

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