alt Hacker News> The only way it really fell short is in the way that a lot of people were predicting that it would become a sort of total replacement for JS+HTML+CSS for building web apps.
I for one hope that doesn't happen anytime soon. YouTube or Spotify could theoretically switch to Wasm drawing to a canvas right now (with a lot of development effort), but that would make the things that are currently possible thanks to the DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.
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I suspect this will be coming soon. For ad-driven companies, having an opaque deployment which would prevent ad-blockers would be ideal.
However ads still need to be delivered over the net so there is still some way to block them (without resorting to router/firewall level blocking).
multiple web apps already work by rendering all to canvas - for example Google Docs and O365
Add Accessibility to that list. Morally speaking, it is likely more important then scraping and ad-blockers.
>>possible thanks to the DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.
lol, you can scrape anything visible on your screen.
> DOM (scraping, ad blockers etc.) harder or impossible.
This is a cat mouse fight, and Facebook already does some ultra-shady stuff like rendering a word as a list of randomly ordered divs for each character, and only using CSS to display in a readable way.
But it can't be made impossible, at the worst case we can always just capture the screen and use an AI to recognize ads, wasting a lot of energy. The same is true for cheating in video games and many forms of online integrity problems - I can just hire a good player who would play in my place, and no technology could recognize that.