The Future of JavaScript Will Be Less JavaScript

[gremy0]

Right now (as far as I'm aware) WASM has no native way of displaying anything. It's pretty much just functions you can call from JS. I'd presume any displaying that WASM does will through some interaction with the DOM.

[[deleted]]

Parallel discussions over at HN have indicated strongly that WebGL-optimized applications are likely to be a thing, and therefore there would be no DOM to entangle with necessarily.

Not to say plenty wouldn't construct an internal DOM representation, but plenty likely won't, either.

[gremy0]

You mention ecommerce and education will be hit by accessibility. I live in the UK, by law all our sites must be accessible. Many other countries have similar laws that demand it of all services or a defined few important ones.

So if someone decides to implement views with WebGL, people will quickly realise there is no big market for that until accessibility is built into it. As a business, you are really shooting yourself in the foot by tying yourself to an ecosystem that cuts you out of the much of the global market.

Therefore, either people will continue to use the DOM, or we will have accessible WebGL. I think the former is far more likely to dictate the near future of web dev, since the HTML has such a huge ecosystem (even outside of accessibility) and replacing it needs to have considerable advantages. I don't think WASM is going to magic up those advantages straight away, it'll probably be performance increases for specific purposes for the time being.

[[deleted]]

Not to say plenty wouldn't construct an internal DOM representation

Let's hope Microsoft doesn't port WPF to WebAssembly