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Comment by clan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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