Even if you use only divs, the actual text is there in UTF-8 to parse out of the DOM, today.
If you go all-in on wasm to do "your own rendering", external software won't know where to find a "DOM" or how to understand it, unless some other kind of reinvented HTML-for-a-wasm-rendering-engine-defacto-standard is invented?
(This is more a rant against "let's reinvent html/css in canvas" rather against a VM-based javascript replacement in general. Even though the latter sounds a bit terrible as well for the open web; imagine what the web would have looked like if .js never existed, and a flash/java .swf/.jar engine was the only way to do scripting in a webpage.)
If you go all-in on wasm to do "your own rendering", external software won't know where to find a "DOM" or how to understand it, unless some other kind of reinvented HTML-for-a-wasm-rendering-engine-defacto-standard is invented?
(This is more a rant against "let's reinvent html/css in canvas" rather against a VM-based javascript replacement in general. Even though the latter sounds a bit terrible as well for the open web; imagine what the web would have looked like if .js never existed, and a flash/java .swf/.jar engine was the only way to do scripting in a webpage.)