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Can we just start over on the entire web stack?

1. create a serious styling and scripting framework, basically React as a language since people seem to like it 2. implement an interpreter in WASM. Ship the interpreter with the website unless the browser says not to 3. over time, build the interpreter into the browser



James Mickens has a talk about doing exactly this [1]. It's a perfectly sensible proposal and the talk is well worth the time to listen to. He makes a solid argument for why this should be done.

Problem: in reality, it is unworkable and will never happen, and even if it did the actual level of "development" that we actually see in the real world would end up in a situation just as bad as the situation we are in now.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI


This is what Flutter was, originally. It was formed by a bunch of ex-Chrome people, including Ian Hixie, the former editor of the HTML spec.


there's canvas, you can already write apps that target it both in unity and Godot, the latter spring a wealth of languages


Question: how do these engines address accessibility issues for, say, a holiday booking site that uses the canvas element for its entire UI?


surprisingly there's some work being done for it

https://godotforums.org/discussion/21963/early-access-of-god...


> Can we just start over on the entire web stack?

Haha, so sorry, but: no.

And if we're starting over, when just start at the web stack?


I think it would worth it to start over with today's knowledge. The whole stack is garbage: HTTP should be replaced with HTTP2 or Quick, vanilla Javascrip is horrible, CSS feel even worse, HTML is not too bad.

Almost all browsers are Webkit based, and there a very few browsers in use (Chrome/Firefox/Safari) which should ease the transition. I can't imagine all the wasted time and energy the world is putting into the current state of the web. A new standard would make navigation more performant, snappier, more responsive and much more reliable.


There's a lot I agree about starting over, but perhaps one of the main features of the web is its backwards compatibility. Most often when things are built from scratch, they fail miserably, unless one entity has full control of the entire stack. Unfortunately, that doesn't really describe the web. We're kind of stuck with a mess.


> create a serious styling framework

For example?




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