I can't help but feel like this is the worst. Every time we step away from HTML & the DOM & into a further farther reach of abstraction, into something custom crafted & artisinal, we lose our valuable common heritage. We flea from common understandability & recurse into something ever more unique & virtual.

In the process- as is the case with Google Docs[1]- we lose things like the ability for web extensions to work, if this is a web hosted vscode instance (vscode server, openvscode, code-server, others). Running a debugger against this part of vscode- web or native- now yields only garbage junk information. The author of this VSCode Canvas renderer chimed in in the Google Docs canvas thread to talk about some of the challenges here[2], which I think still undersells how dangerous this plan is, & also doesn't discuss how far (or not) we've gone to optimize the DOM renderers.

Right now this is just the terminal. I think- "it could be worse". But it chills me deeply that the terminal is now no longer real information. It's now just a happenstance jumble of pixels, powered by only it's own inner logic & a unique maze of libraries. Big tech keeps optimizing and optimizing, & the motive we keep being sold- this is for your good, this helps you- is one I frankly have a very hard time negotiating with myself. De-webbifying the web, de-commonizing the common platform- as Facebook has done by virtualizing the DOM- feels like this ever-running big-bang from a truthful original universe into a sparse, cold, expanding universe where each little fragment defines itself, where the common hypertext medium no longer means anything.

I keep waiting for some moments of contraction, some coming back together, for things to make more sense again, to recontract into something more solid. React's first WebComponents PR[3] is a notable re-contracting, re-platforming- a powerful act I frankly didn't expect, so rare as to feel practically unprecedented.

I realize much of this flexibility, the demonstrated versatility of the web & usage of the various pieces of it represents much of it's strength. The platform being a low-level platform where higher level platforms can be created is amazing; the Extensible Web Manifesto[4] speaks to that emergence of newer higher levels systems. And right now we're in early days, just starting a precambrian explosion of higher level web, as technology like WebAssembly only just begins to become real- still so early, still way pre-pre- Interface Types[5]/Host Bindings, only just the crudest emulation beginning in via projects like Rust's wasm-bindgen / web-sys. I am happy we are still exploding. We have so much more to exlpore. But gee I also question so much when big enterprises turn hypertext into pixels. To move compute into webassembly is a bold leap but the hypertext can survive, the DOM is still truth. It's so uncertain to me, feels like so much might be lost when giants like Microsoft or Google yank out the HTML & replace it with pixels, pushed into our faces. It feels like betrayal, like sabotage, like we're giving up truth.

[1] https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2021/05/Google-Docs-...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27131659

[3] https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/22184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29505332 (16 days, 0 comments)

[4] https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto

[5] https://github.com/WebAssembly/interface-types/blob/main/pro...