At the end of the day all it would take is one of the 3 major browser vendors to offer an alternative. That alternative could be distributed to a large percentage of desktops in a relatively quick manner saving billions if not trillions of dollars in wasted productivity.
It will never happen though.
* EDIT: This comes from someone who uses React, Redux, webpack, etc.. daily
Not that I even like XML. But having another XML dialect that's not actual XML shows that the only hope is to build valid tools and abstractions on top of all the crud.
HTML is based on SGML, it was never an XML dialect.
Or write content/metadata schemas (distinct from a DTD schema that simply describes html5) using XSD?
Unlike xhtml, my understanding, was that the current tooling around XML won't just work out-of-the-box for html5.
You can parse HTML 5 into XML using my HTML 5 DTD [1] and eg. OpenSP's osx tool or my upcoming sgmljs.net tool.
What do you have against DTDs? They do the same as XSD, and then some.
You mean like Dart?
Besides, languages that target WebAssembly are almost certainly going to evolve to fit that space.
And are already but now targeting JS. Like PureScript, ReasonML, Elm and even TypeScipt to some extend.
The idea that all of sudden there is going to be a rush to push compiled/closed sites after so many very successful years of using free-and-open stacks seems rather non-logical to me.
Time will tell.
Sorry, this ship has sailed.
Well, then we have minified JS that isn't exactly readable. Similarly with multiple-compiled JSX-to-ES6-to-ES5/JS code.
Also, there's a number of JS obfuscators, whose main purpose is to smuggle a piece of closed code into those theoretically “free-and-open” stacks.
Thus, I think, after wasm becomes generally supported, there will be more incentive to write code in your language of choice and compile it to a common platform, than to write code in JS or one of its derivatives and minify/compile it anyway.
It's worth noting WebAssembly isn't compiled into a form only computers can understand. There are plans to offer 'View Source'-style functionality for WebAssembly. WASM is a compressed AST rather than hardware-specific bytecode.
The correct comparison there is Dart. WebAssembly is a joint effort being developed by a team comprised of folks from every major browser vendor, so it isn't really an example of what they're talking about.