When talking about web technologies I am astonished by the repeated irrationality. Most JavaScript developers are deathly afraid of the DOM. They will happily sink their careers over it and perform 100x more work to not contend with it and justify the strangeness of that reasoning in really creative irrational ways. It’s bizarrely fascinating. That phobia is further strange considering it’s about a skill that can be learned in 2 hours of active study and mastered in 4.
Then there are people who are equally fearful of JavaScript. Again, they will justify their phobia in all manners of ways at great energy. They will even form an alternate future reality to justify knowingly bad decisions in the present.
Both of the groups are really demonstrating the same phobia with all the same behaviors but just slightly shifting the subject a bit. What’s ironic though is that the people afraid of JavaScript, and thus having little to none experience working with or understanding the DOM, really want access to DOM.
When you get past the irrational fear around these things the motivations of the technologies and their direction becomes something completely different. This is why web technologies are difined in one way and yet people strangely impose their own alternate realities, abstractions, and unfounded projections upon them. It’s also why the standard technologies are slow, intentionally so, to reflect certain things even those things are highly demanded.
I have encountered these phobias enough, even in person, that I am curious to learn more about them and how they arise.
It is the need to feel assured one did the right choice to belong to a certain group.
As polyglot developer I have a schizophrenic attitude towards technology, you will see me bashing tech X in one thread and praising it in another one.
Because at the end of the day, regardless of my personal opinions, is what the customer wants that counts, and every tool has plus and minus.
Now, some people that sell themselves as Developer on X, User of Y, need to be sure that they did the right choice otherwise the hard truth is that they need to go elsewhere.
Naturally this creates a religious attitude around technology decisions and us vs them.
As for the Web, from my point of view it should have stayed for interactive documents, with native for everything else, using Internet network protocols as it was.
Everyone wanted to turn browsers into general purpose VMs instead, so naturally we are now here, with everyone porting their favourite stack into WebAssembly.
If DOM access to the page were to come to WASM what is the expectation that deveopers suddenly learn to appreciate and execute DOM instructions? On what basis do you form your answer?
Due to the phobias I described above my expectations of success are low, and rightly so. Rather, people are whining for something they don't have in their favorite language and if they get it the results will be a shit show. I espcially doubt advanced topics, such as accessibility, will be successful. If subjects that actually are challenging were taking seriously these developers wouldn't be crying something simple, like executing the DOM from JavaScript.
You completely ignored the details of the thing you linked to and you completely ignored my comment to do it. Dillusionment is a part of extreme reactions to phobias.
Restating the goals of the WASM project and actually reading the spec doesn’t make anybody a hater. Also Flash had the equivalent of host bindings and could not modify the containing page.
Then there are people who are equally fearful of JavaScript. Again, they will justify their phobia in all manners of ways at great energy. They will even form an alternate future reality to justify knowingly bad decisions in the present.
Both of the groups are really demonstrating the same phobia with all the same behaviors but just slightly shifting the subject a bit. What’s ironic though is that the people afraid of JavaScript, and thus having little to none experience working with or understanding the DOM, really want access to DOM.
When you get past the irrational fear around these things the motivations of the technologies and their direction becomes something completely different. This is why web technologies are difined in one way and yet people strangely impose their own alternate realities, abstractions, and unfounded projections upon them. It’s also why the standard technologies are slow, intentionally so, to reflect certain things even those things are highly demanded.
I have encountered these phobias enough, even in person, that I am curious to learn more about them and how they arise.