Recently WHATWG editor Ian Hixie floated the idea of dropping HTML/CSS in favor of WASM & some of the lower-level APIs. Stating that he's given up on the HTML/CSS vision.

I haven't given up on that vision, but you know what? If this move gets clientside webapps out of my hair, I'm in favor of it being pursued!

I've stated before that I think the document web & app web should diverge!

@alcinnz can we drop the illusion of the "web app" vision and adopt a stack modeled after mobile app sandboxing?

@lunch @alcinnz I mean this is just the idea of the Java Applet. The applet idea was way ahead of its time.

Now we're getting the same thing, just with a worse VM.

@loke @lunch You know I've got a comment queued up saying that I don't fear the webdev's boogey man that is Flash.

I've seen @Azure mock the Flash villification, but that'll be a good introduction for when I get around to studying a Rust reimplementation "Ruffle".

@alcinnz @loke @Azure can we just have a wasm interface to native gtk so everyone doesn't have to reinvent their own ui toolkits and ship them with each application?

@lunch @alcinnz @Azure Imagine that. A common UI framework. Like, people could write applications that are consistent and easy to use. It would also allow users to customise their UI experience across all applications. You could call that themeing.

Nah, that's crazy talk it'll never work.

@loke @lunch @alcinnz @Azure Themeing is one of the biggest things I feel is missing from the web. I love being able to customize my desktop experience.

In @agregore I've been encouraging apps to import a CSS file that can be customized by users in order to apply some default styling to an app. I still need to make it easier to make new themes, but at least it gives web users a bit more power than they have now.