alt Hacker NewsThat is never going to happen until you create your own browser with a fork of the WASM spec. People have been asking for this for about a decade. The WASM team knows this but WASM wants to focus on its mission of being a universal compile target without distraction of the completely unrelated mission of being a JavaScript replacement.
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chrismorgan • today at 9:10 AM
On the contrary, it’s something that solid progress is being made towards, and which has been acknowledged (for better or for worse) as something that they expect to be supported eventually. They’re just taking it slow, to make sure they get it right. But most of the fundamental building blocks are in place now, it’s definitely getting closer.
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sfn42 • today at 8:39 AM
Sounds to me like they forgot the W in WASM.
It's also too early to worry about DOM apis over wasm instead of js.
The whole problem with the DOM is that it has too many methods which can't be phased out without losing backwards compatibility.
A new DOM wasm api would be better off starting with a reduced API of only the good data and operations.
The problem is that the DOM is still improving (even today), it's not stabilized so we don't have that reduced set to draw from, and if you were to mark a line in the sand and say this is our reduced set, it would already not be what developers want within a year or two.
New DOM stuff is coming out all the time, even right now we two features coming out that can completely change the way that developers could want to build applications:
- being able to move dom nodes without having to destroy and recreate them. This makes it possible so you can keep the state inside that dom node unaffected, such as a video playing without having to unload and reload a video. Now imagine if that state can be kept over the threshold of a multi-page view transition.
- the improved attr() api which can move a lot of an app's complexity from the imperative side to the declarative side. Imagine a single css file that allows html content creators to dictate their own grid layouts, without needing to calculate every possible grid layout at build time.
And just in the near future things are moving to allow html modules which could be used with new web component apis to prevent the need for frameworks in large applications.
Also language features can inform API design. Promises were added to JS after a bunch of DOM APIs were already written, and now promises can be abortable. Wouldn't we want the new reduced API set to also be built upon abortable promises? Yes we would. But if we wait a bit longer, we could also take advantage of newer language features being worked on in JS like structs and deeply immutable data structures.
TL;DR: It's still too early to work on a DOM api for wasm. It's better to wait for the DOM to stabalize first.