emscripten

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Michael Stover" <michael.r.stover at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1039.1292444687.21107.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> >Trying to
> make an online payment to Visa or check on one of Visa's policies? Are you
> gonna be able to do that at MasterCard's website? With desktop software
> stuff like that rarely happens. Basically, websites/webapps have a greater
> need for compatibility than desktop apps do.
>
> Again, we're not talking about *websites*.  We're talking about web 
> *apps*.
> Of course your bank site ought to provide you your account info whether 
> you
> are on a Mac or Windows and even if you use IE 5.5.  But that's not what
> we're talking about.  We're talking about someone making an application
> that, today or in the past you would have downloaded and installed, and
> instead making it runnable in a browser.  It's not content, it's
> *behavior*you're there for, and therefore, if they require Chrome and
> you are a
> devoted Firefox user, then you can find someone else who provides that
> behavior in Firefox and use them instead.  There's no tie to some 
> particular
> content provided (like Visa), just like there isn't with desktop apps.
>

When you're arguing that web technologies aren't so bad, it must be an 
immense convenience to wave that magic wand and claim that one of the major 
counterpoints to your argument just simply doesn't count. We most certainly 
are are talking about both websites and webapps.

And frankly, even if we were just talking your overy-limited, IMO, 
definition of "webapp", it still makes no sense. They're much harder to get 
working well than real apps, take up more resources, and you have to use 
them through what's literally nothing more than a hacked-up document viewer. 
And none of that is going to change (most of it *can't*).

Fuck, we might as well be trying to find fast/effective ways to tunnel our 
code through Logo or GWBasic - you know, just for the fuck of it. Or find 
ways to get photos from a digital camera to a computer by tunneling it all 
through a printer and a scanner - just for the fuck of it. Sure, we might be 
able to get it to a "usable" level, but what would be the point? It would 
still be completely idiotic (except as just a "for shits and grins" kinda 
thing).

And yet, that's exactly what people making "webapps" (in your sense of the 
term) and webapp libraries and faster JS implementations are doing (and yet 
they're actually taking it all seriously!): they're tossing in utterly 
useless and mediocre-at-best layers that serve absolutely no damn purpose 
other than maybe to boost sales of more powerful PC hardware. There is no 
possible benefit of webapps that can't be handled perfectly fine, if not 
better, *without* trying to cram the whole damn thing through a web browser.