Applets also had no view-source.

Spiritually the web ought to be more than an application development platform. We haven't been doing great about that (with heavily compiled js bundles), but there's still a lot of extensions that many users take for granted. I'm using a continual wordcount extension (50 words so far), and Dark Reader right now.

Applet's are the native app paradigm, where what the app-makers writes is what you get, never a drop more. It's not great. The internet, the land of protocols, deserved better. Is so interesting because it is better.

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wiseowise 3 days ago | parent [-]

Don’t worry, they’re trying to sneak back in with WASM and drawing everything to canvas.

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MarsIronPI 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

At least with WASM I'm not stuck using Javascript whether I like it or not. Yes, transpiling to Javascript is a thing, but it's not too much better, since transpiled code isn't much more readable than WASM (see also ClojureScript; CoffeScript isn't too bad though, but it's almost equivalent to JS).

	▲	jauntywundrkind 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		With v-dom and bundles, we have lost a lot of the societal wins of view-source already. Extensions still work but user agency is more limited. The view you are saying here is one that seems resoundingly common. Is what I heard from Flutter and flutter-web: my experience as a dve is what matters. What I can make is what matters. That's true, sure! But there's a balance. Society matters too. What agency users have, what their user agency allows them to do, how they can circuit bend your website for themselves also matters. How we judge the scales here is a factor. I am so so excited for wasm. Particularly wasm-components, where there is more than a huge mega bundle of compile code, where there are intelligible code boundaries and calls across modules. That, I want to hope will be a semi legibile WASM. But a lot of wasm today feels like it really slides back down the ladder into this rebuffing form of development that doesn't recognize any of how the web was better because it was more than the synthetic product it created, how the web was better for it's protocols, legibility, and user agency. I hope we don't slide back into a new Flash or Applet era, where the user & legibility & agency are given no regard, where a developer egocentricity is the only guiding principle.

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zihotki 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I wish there was a setting in major browsers to disable WASM or at least ask to enable per site