The problem is that browsers started out as hypertext clients and unwittingly evolved into application platforms to implement, among other things, custom hypertext clients in it. Somehow “lets add more features to make hypertext more capable” turned into “you’re on your own now to implement a usable application with this big incoherent pile of impedance-mismatched features”.
Yep, and it's pretty nice. However, he talks about important things that weren't in Flash, like accessibility, and how to handle them cleanly.
It really seems like WASM will be the write once run everywhere runtime that was touted in the past. Java almost got us there but was too dependent on Java, whereas WASM is for any language. I've been using Flutter with their experimental web WASM support and it's very fast.
I think this makes sense for complex apps like games, CAD and design software, etc.
I hope it doesn't replace the lowest common denominator of HTML for generic apps, though, if only because it would dramatically raise the barrier to entry (not that your typical React app is particularly readable in the inspector...).
Yeah Figma is in WASM and it's great that it is. I don't see it coming for React apps, really. Or if it is, that the JS tooling itself will automatically convert it to WASM.
I personally use Flutter for a lot of my apps, as well as React/NextJS for SEO based apps, the combo works pretty well.
Yeah, Figma's tech is incredible! Especially when I use side by side with Microsoft Teams, lol. One's a complex layered drawing app with plug-ins and imports and the other is a glorified chat app... guess which one is 10x slower and crashes every half an hour?
