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Comment by nyanpasu64 | Hacker News Reader

If an entire UI (content plus ads) is drawn with wasm onto a canvas (the way Qt WebAssembly does it), it will be impossible to use CSS to hide ads, and possibly more difficult to modify the script to disable the ad-loading functions.

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Doesn't sound very feasible, as this would make user experience probably much worse. No native elements, no browser integration or extensions, interaction with the page, and accessibility. They all would suffer.

If publishers valued user experience over ad income, they wouldn't show ads to begin with.

> No native elements, no browser integration or extensions, interaction with the page, and accessibility.

Sounds like the pages made in Flash (or even Java) which were somewhat common in the 90s.

> No native elements, no browser integration or extensions, interaction with the page, and accessibility. They all would suffer.

Uh, but those things are already happening right now, e.g. Flutter Web UI [1]

[1] https://hugotunius.se/2020/10/31/flutter-web-a-fractal-of-ba...

Right but my point is you can _already_ do this in javascript, but people largely don't. The playing field doesn't change with WASM. If some WASM code creates a canvas-based ad, we can use the usual tactics to block it (delete the element by ID/selector/etc or block that particular WASM payload)

Google would probably not feature you very high in search results, though, since your website has no indexable text.

If this technique would become popular, Google will OCR it just like it runs JS.

This technique is essentially the same as websites made entirely in Flash back in the day. And back then, the only way to have Google index your site was to provide a separate (hidden) version that used normal, semantic HTML.

They can use it only for video players that'll autoplay for example.

Google is an advertising company. It would make sure there is a way to get your site indexed, perhaps by providing an alternate machine-readable version just to them. As a bonus, that version would not be available to potential competitors.

Googlebot runs a full web browser these days and executes javascript to a certain extent. WASM will have the same treatment if/when it becomes widespread if it doesn't already.

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