Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

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no view source! that broke the basic treatise of the internet. it wasn't a protocol, wasnt a medium: it was someone else highjacking your shit & doing what they wanted in a filthy untouchable applicationized sandbox you had no power over it. you the user has no power, no visibility, no say. application,. it a medium: out of your reach.

very little of this submitted screed touches upon this area, but to me the anti-webassembly remarks feel very close fit to anti-flash remarks. js has gotten bad, but I continue to think eventually we'll see better actors (especially with an arisal of custom elements). webassembly makes me think the web will get anti-web anti-understandable, anti-user as a medium increasingly for the next 50 years probably, most of my remaining life. doing good & being a respectful medium will be just as possible as without webassembly, but there will be so much energy & focus on an industrialized non-user non-acessible non-user-agency dark world shadow-nightmare hell-web because of webhassembly, that will absolutely dominate & be enticing to so so so wide a range of the alpha geeks... while users lose & lose & lose.

flash 2.0 is coming & it will be cheered & celebrated & far far worse for users than the flash we have finally killed.

> no view source! that broke the basic treatise of the internet.

I was pretty young, but I'm pretty sure I remember opening someone else's swf file in a decompiler in middle school. It was a little weird but I was able to make the changes I wanted.

How editable is WASM code, really?

How editable is raw JFIF data, really? You need to run it through some fancy graphics library before you can do anything with it. /s

It's not as much how you can hack around it but more about open-by-default and open-by-design.

Well, that was my point about SWF files. You could edit them with the right tools. But like WASM, they are far less editable than the original source files.

Unfortunately, there are very practical performance reasons to send information in a "compiled," less-editable format. Which is why even static sites nowadays typically use some type of build system.

Yeah, that's very true.

I do wonder if with the 'somewhat standard' min.map files that can point out what the rendered versions relate to in the 'source' versions could somehow be enforced. That way you can still use the compact version first and if you do want to see what's happening you can just get the map and the source and explore.

Even if you do decompile the SWF & edit it, the flash can still interact with the page. In many cases you'd need to alter the page too, to inject your hacked swf.

Wasm code is editable via the very very good dev tools systems we have today, mostly dictated via the Chrome DevTools protocol which even Mozilla largely harkens to & which is being semi-standardized through wicg[1]. Still fairly early days but support is not bad! But... it's a monumentally harder challenge imo than JS. There are source maps, so if the site is nice, you can see what the authored uncompiled code was, but there's no facility to author in that language & recompile your changes via the debugger. And I fear few sites will post the source maps to make webassembly comprehendible. Few sites have morals, ethics, or respect for the web as a medium: they see it as a platform for them alone to dictate to you the user what you get. This, to me, is the sad end Flash had forced upon us, that the web was so much better than.

[1] https://github.com/WICG/devtools-protocol

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