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Comment by tokenizerrr | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps we should be going back to writing websites in assembly.

See http://webassembly.org/ . While not raw assembly, we have to because of the js nonsense. This will ofcourse also increase the jsnonsense, cause now everything will be more efficient so we can put alot more crap.

I am aware of webassembly, and I'm sure that codedokode would explode if s/he were to notice that a website such as this was written using it.

It wouldn't run without JavaScript being enabled, for one.

In future publishers will probably use web assembly for DRM, for example, to render decrypted article text on a canvas so that it cannot be copied, zoomed, read aloud or viewed without advertisement and annoying popups. Maybe you will change your mind about Javascript then.

You jest, but in one of the discussions for EME, that exact case was brought up.

Only they wanted to drm javascript sent to the browser. We got rid of Flash only to see a new hydra head emerge. People clamoring for javascript applications should be careful what they wish for. They just might get it.

I don't think this is a fair argument. Writing web pages as single page JS apps is _harder_ than writing them as server-side generated html responses. And in many cases (this one as a great example), the user experience is worse for having done so.

This is such a bad example, as JS is actually more low level than a declarative language like HTML.

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