The modern web feels a bit like ground hog day. We're running around in circles. I think of it as a collective delusion that CSS/HTML is actually remotely good at what it is supposed to do. It's not. Most of the modern web is a UX disaster shit show. Brutalist design is actually making a comeback because people are just disillusioned with the perpetual inability of web developers to produce things that are both functional, usable, and beautiful. Mostly usability goes out of the window first, soon followed by functional. HN is a fine example of not bothering with any of that stuff. That's why we all love it. But is this honestly the best we can do with the web?

It's actually super tedious to develop for the modern web. Mostly it's made somewhat tolerable these days by treating it as a compilation target rather than something you manipulate "natively". Handcrafting CSS without pre processors is just not a thing in modern web development. No variables ... because reasons. Twenty years ago the need for them was pretty damn obvious already. Never happened. Eventually the status quo somehow became handcrafting something that manipulates a super convoluted dom tree with nodes that have manually assigned class and id names that need to line up with LESS/SASS/SCSS/whatever rules that manipulate the browsers ability to transform that mess into something that somewhat matches what the designers had in their heads. You get silly things like using negative margins, various "layout models", and other crazy hacks of the variety "hmm maybe this will work?" that went in and out of fashion over time combined with all sorts of hacks to make IE whatever do loosely the same things that e.g. Firefox does

I have good hopes for WASM steamrolling over this dysfunctional ecosystem in the next few years. It will change two things:

1) javascript stops being the only, or even a reasonable choice. Already, typescript is emerging as the most sane way to transpile to javascript and it's a definite step up. But honestly, it's got nothing on Kotlin/Swift, and many other languages. 2019 looks like a year where several non javascript centric frameworks will emerge that will bypass most of the javascript ecosystem and compile straight to WASM. I know the Rust people are pretty ambitious on this front. Early Kotlin and C# stuff already exists as well. IMHO it will probably take another couple of years of this stuff gradually getting better until we hit the hockey stick curve where suddenly this stuff is everywhere.

2) Having wasm + webgl means that all the stuff that people did with plugins 20 years ago that to this day is super hard/tedious/virtually impossible to reproduce with JS/CSS, is now super easy to do again. And this time we can do it in a safe and cross platform way. This opens the door to doing UI that is not based on DOM + CSS and without all the limitations that imposes on designers. I expect a lot of game, VR, AR, and media content will soon run on top of this stuff and that the amount of 'traditional' web UI around that will gradually disappear or become less important. Right now you see a lot of nice demos and proofs of concept but not much serious content yet. I'm expecting this stuff to become more serious gradually until we hit the before mentioned hockey stick curve where this is obviously the way to stand out from the mediocrity that is the "modern" web.