And then if all web apps move to a canvas-painted UI with all the code in web assembly then there will be a major accessibility problem.
Unless screen readers can now dive down into the canvas layer?
Unless screen readers can now dive down into the canvas layer?
There will also be performance problems. The web is already slow using the heavily optimized DOM. It's going to be so much slower when things try to use a fullscreen Canvas instead. That breaks all sorts of optimization opportunities browsers currently leverage.
But sadly it'll probably happen. We'll all end up downloading forks of browsers in various states on each site we go to as each site decides to re-invent the DOM & all the rendering optimizations that go along with it.
I know nothing about webm beyond the idea that it's supposed to help developers write code in non-Javescript languages which can then be run in a web page via a canvas element. If my scant understanding is correct, then I assume it will be up to those developers to include code (or relevant libraries in each language) that will make the canvas element act responsively, and handle issues like accessibility, user interaction, tracking etc to give the best user experience?
My view is that current Javascript libraries that target the canvas element have largely failed to address canvas-related issues such as accessibility in a decent way - which doesn't give me much hope that future webm libraries which could be used to build user interfaces will do any better ... unless there's strong pressure to make accessibility a core goal for such libraries.
There's no good reason not to include accessibility (and user interaction, tracking etc) into any library - including JS libraries - that target the canvas element. Part of the reason for me recoding my own JS canvas library was to address exactly these issues (results of my work here[1]), and if I can manage to solve a lot of the issues then there's no reason why others library maintainers couldn't do a much better job of it than I did!
As a web-development near illiterate, this equals to me as pages that aren't auditable before they're shown, which would pretty much translate into unblockable ads. Please someone tell me I am wrong.
If you switch off javascript then the WASM files won't be able to be loaded.
Then on top of that I guess you could just filter for all `canvas` elements. That will cripple some [biased edit: worthwhile] uses at the same time, though.
Text recognition is getting pretty good nowadays afterall.
The modern web already burned that bridge and loudly declared that it doesn't give two shits about accessibility. There are plenty of companies that gladly sacrifice accessibility to have "beautiful" interfaces designed by some self-important jackass.
If you meant performance in terms of runtime, I'm not convinced this is the case. Obviously WebAssembly will have some overhead, but I don't think the overhead is critical enough for most applications to matter. Especially if those applications are written in anything other than C/C++, they'll have similar performance characteristics.
Obviously, for such a wide prediction I can only speak theoretically...