D could catch this wave: web assembly

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 20 June 2015 at 19:00:08 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> I probably haven't been clear enough about what I mean.  The 
> original model for the web was a bunch of hyperlinked 
> pages/documents.  But that model increasingly breaks down as 
> you make the page more dynamic.  What are you linking to 
> anymore: a page, an app, or a widget within the app?

Yes, but would it be better to just have pages and no apps? I 
don't think so. When I build an order system it is very useful to 
build it like an app.

The fact is that networking bandwidth is now so large that you 
often can download the catalog for an online shop at once, 
compressed it is the size of an image...

Of course, the app programmer will have to decide how that maps 
to urls, or if it should map to urls. You can do it with the 
hash-tag or by changing the visible url without reloading (on 
modern browsers). I do that if it is important.

> widgets of AJAX and HTML5, rifts crop up.  The recent web 
> components efforts you highlight do not address this at all, 
> they merely make it easier to build more dynamic webapps.

It kinda does. Because you can then serve pages with markup that 
do things that are specific for the site. When you can attach 
behaviour to tags implicitly you get to build your own 
markup-language for the site.

> My point was that text makes some sense for the layout of a 
> document format, but efficiency is key in vector graphics, so 
> you always want to go binary there.

If the vector graphic is intricate it will take time to render 
it. So there is a limit to how much data you want, I don't think 
text-transmission is the main issue.

> Then have SVG be an authoring format that is subsequently 
> "compiled" down to an efficient binary encoding for 
> distribution. There is _zero_ reason for text SVG to be the 
> actual end-user format.  I bet a lot of the bloat issues that 
> Wyatt pointed out are exactly because of this.

You can do that if you want. Just download binary data and plot 
it to a canvas.

But there is no way you could introduce binary SVG when using SVG 
dynamically. That would require specialized binary-format editors 
for both SVG and HTML. You would basically want binary HTML too, 
then.