alt Hacker NewsI don't think their concerns were concrete or clear. What does "portable" mean? There are computers out there that can't support the existing feature set of HTML5, e.g. because they lack a GPU. But WebGPU and WebGL are a part of the web's feature set. There's lots of stuff like that in the web platform. It's easy to write HTML that is nearly useless on mobile devices, it's actually the default state. You have to do extra work to ensure a web page is portable even just with basic HTML to mobile. So we can't truly say the web is always "portable" to every imaginable device.
And was NPAPI not a part of the web, and a key part of its early success? Was ActiveX not a part of the web? I think they both were.
So the idea of portability is not and never has been a requirement for something to be "the web". There have been non-portable web pages for the entire history of the web. The sky didn't fall.
The idea that everything must target an abstract machine whether the authors want that or not is clearly key to Mozilla's idea of "webbyness", but there's no historical precedent for this, which is why NaCL didn't insist on it.
> What does "portable" mean?
In the context of the web, portability means that you can, ideally at least, use any browser on any platform to access any website. Of course that isn't always possible, as you say. But adding a big new restriction, "these websites only run on x86" was very unpopular in the web ecosystem - we should at least aim to increase portability, not reduce it.
> And was NPAPI not a part of the web, and a key part of its early success? Was ActiveX not a part of the web? I think they both were.
Historically, yes, and Flash as well. But the web ecosystem moved away from those things for a reason. They brought not only portability issues but also security risks.