Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

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One day, someone just needs to build an accessibility system for WASM; and maybe (additionally) an overlay system telling the browser that pixels X1, Y1 to X2, Y2 are selectable text.

The moment we do that; we can theoretically implement any GUI framework we like, rendering to a <canvas> tag, without the current (serious) downsides. I’m looking forward towards more exploration of that direction. Then, we can mostly be free of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript defining how apps can be built. Those three tools that have long outlived their original intentions and have gone into complete duct-tape territory.

AI however, might actually solve this sooner than we realize. Apple already uses AI to copy-paste text from images. I’m sure there’s plenty of R&D going on right now on using AI to describe what is on screen. In theory, maybe we can legitimately AI our way out of needing accessibility concessions, and off we go. Build your website in Flutter; or in MAUI; or in some DIY port of SwiftUI; whatever you want.

While I am somewhat entranced by the ideal, presumably the realities of SEO and how most of the web is funded would put a stop to it?

This is somewhat like the leap Figma has made. They were able to build their own walled-garden, offer value in it, and not have to worry about SEO. Most of the web is not in that position.

I'd imagine we'd be better off with more such fragmentation, though?

The internet was built to allow fragmentation, of protocols, of tech, of connections. It is just that, of course, most sites must flow to where the easy $ are. Let's just hope that enough good sites can escape the pull of easy $.

I think the short answer, is SEO is dying rapidly in the age of AI search engines. Search traffic is anecdotally being severely damaged when everyone can just get an AI answer; ad revenue is down especially after the pandemic; SEO spam is increasing from AI-generated websites.

We might reach the point of saying, screw it, it hardly matters anymore. The web has been conquered by LOB apps, Paywalls, and Walled Gardens; and there’s no real way to fix that, but there is a way to fix the tech we are using.

If anything, if we fully embrace “web as app engine,” we can fix some of these issues ahead of time. Maybe we have a standard entry point for crawlers (or users) requesting the raw text of a document. It’s better than being stuck in this awful in-between which we are right now.

Can't you already do this by creating a tree of invisible DOM elements with the right ARIA attributes?

And then we'll return to Java Beans and ugly, inflexible text layout, isn't it?

We’re already getting there. At one point we’re just ripping off the bandage.

On the upside, most people don’t build their own frameworks. Implement it right in Flutter, MAUI, etc. in such a scenario, and almost nobody will be harmed.

Also, for anyone who just says this is Java and Flash all over again - we’ve had plenty of technologies come full circle. WASM might be the one that gets us to full “web as app engine.” It already basically is, just badly.

We already back there, apparently many haven't yet noticed that all those systems have been ported into WebAssembly, the main issue is that tooling experience is yet to follow along.

Silverlight, Applets, Flash, all have WebAssembly runtimes now.

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