What does webasm enable that would cause such a massive difference in how people create web pages? Everything it does could be done now with javascript or asm.js, all webasm does is enable the same things to run faster.
I can't think of a single site that works like you are saying, yet webasm would only be a 2x-8x speedup over existing techniques.
> I guess you missed all those sites using Flash, Silverlight, Applets, WebStart, ClickOnce and many other plugins.
I did actually, because most aren't around any more. Even so, I was talking about sites that purely use the html canvas to draw. There is nothing preventing websites from being built like that right now, so I don't see how webasm will make much of a difference.
Web Assembly would allow devs to build apps without any html or javascript or css.
The UI construct could be WPF/XAML or even WinForms like tech or something new.
Scripting and CSS would be entirely unnecessary. A lot of businesses would love nothing better than to dump the Jedi-like skills of the scripting developers and trade that for mundane forms skills.
you appear to be missing the fact that there is no widespread desire by web developers or businesses to convert their webdev stack to an application development stack.
HTML, javascript and CSS are easier than C, C++ or Rust. Writing a website in HTML/CSS/JS and updating a website in HTML/CSS/JS are vastly simpler than writing a graphical application then rewriting and recompiling it.
As with Flash, WebAssembly will be implemented as fully integrated apps where it makes business sense, which will probably be a limited number of cases, such as graphics or media delivery. Everywhere else, it will either not be implemented at all, or be used alongside JS in the existing web.
Qt, Delphi, WPF are miles ahead in terms of tooling in what a pile of HTML, CSS and JavaScript are capable of.
Anvil and tools like OutSystems are probably the one thing that comes close to what Blend is capable of.
Having a pixel perfect WYSIWYG GUI designer, with a components market, painless DB integration and deploying to the web at the press of a button will get lots of enterprise love.
I don't disagree with that. I disagree with your original premise that all websites will eventually be compiled WASM blobs. There's simply no reason for that to ever be the case, no matter how nice the tooling gets.
Not every site is a business site and not every business with a website has the budget or impetus to chase the bleeding edge of web development. HTML and javascript will continue to exist and be supported by browsers for the forseeable future (meaning the option to choose not to use WASM will also always be there.) Billions and billions of sites already on the web which would have to be completely taken down and rebuilt for no practical reason.
I look forward to the age of embedded binary apps on the web . I think the web is the only real option we have to preserve software long-term, and the likelihood of software being preserved is enhanced by that software remaining executable. But even in my wildest fantasies where every program ever written maps to a URL, I doubt that use case will take up more than a fraction of online content. The web is just too big and too complex and too general to reduce to any single heuristic or use case.
People are still using COBOL and Perl and pushing code to production with Notepad++ and Filezilla. The real world doesn't optimize the way you're suggesting it would. The business world certainly doesn't.
No one is suggesting wasm would replace all of the web.
We're just saying the developer and deployment optimization story would be vastly simplified without the JS/HTML/CSS stack.
Those of us who remember what development was like before "front-end" development as it is today know that story very well. The amount of undocumented, untested, and wonky code in the current web stack has always seemed ridiculous to us.
The problem with ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, and OneClick was never about the developer story. It was about security and openness. WebAssembly solves both of those problems.
Open tools, pixel-perfect GUI design, compilers and debuggers, and strongly-typed languages would absolutely reduce the amount of HTML/JS/CSS in the world. It may not kill all of it, but it would put a sizable dent in it.
I can't think of a single site that works like you are saying, yet webasm would only be a 2x-8x speedup over existing techniques.