> Why can't browsers adopt a system like video streaming, where you "stream" a binary of your site?
I'll have to speculate what you mean
1. If you mean drawing pixels directly instead of relying on HTML, it's going to be slower. (either because of network lag or because of WASM overhead)
2. If you mean streaming video to the browser and rendering your site server-side, it will break features like resizing the window or turning a phone sideways, and it will be hideously expensive to host.
3. It will break all accessibility features like Android's built-in screen reader, because you aren't going to maintain all the screen reader and braille stuff that everyone might need server-side, and if you do, you're going to break the workflow for someone who relies on a custom tweak to it.
4. If you are drawing pixels from scratch you also have to re-implement stuff like selecting and copying text, which is possible but not feasible.
5. A really good GUI toolkit like Qt or Chromium will take 50-100 MB. Say you can trim your site's server-side toolkit down to 10 MB somehow. If you are very very lucky, you can share some of that in the browser's cache with other sites, _if_ you are using the same exact version of the toolkit, on the same CDN. Now you are locked into using a CDN. Now your website costs 10 MB for everyone loading it with a fresh cache.
You can definitely do this if your site _needs_ it. Like, you can't build OpenStreetMap without JS, you can't build chat apps without `fetch`, and there are certain things where drawing every pixel yourself and running a custom client-side GUI toolkit might make sense. But it's like 1% of sites.
I hate HTML but it's a local minimum. For animals, weight is a type of strength, for software, popularity is a type of strength. It is really hard to beat something that's installed everywhere.
I'll have to speculate what you mean
1. If you mean drawing pixels directly instead of relying on HTML, it's going to be slower. (either because of network lag or because of WASM overhead)
2. If you mean streaming video to the browser and rendering your site server-side, it will break features like resizing the window or turning a phone sideways, and it will be hideously expensive to host.
3. It will break all accessibility features like Android's built-in screen reader, because you aren't going to maintain all the screen reader and braille stuff that everyone might need server-side, and if you do, you're going to break the workflow for someone who relies on a custom tweak to it.
4. If you are drawing pixels from scratch you also have to re-implement stuff like selecting and copying text, which is possible but not feasible.
5. A really good GUI toolkit like Qt or Chromium will take 50-100 MB. Say you can trim your site's server-side toolkit down to 10 MB somehow. If you are very very lucky, you can share some of that in the browser's cache with other sites, _if_ you are using the same exact version of the toolkit, on the same CDN. Now you are locked into using a CDN. Now your website costs 10 MB for everyone loading it with a fresh cache.
You can definitely do this if your site _needs_ it. Like, you can't build OpenStreetMap without JS, you can't build chat apps without `fetch`, and there are certain things where drawing every pixel yourself and running a custom client-side GUI toolkit might make sense. But it's like 1% of sites.
I hate HTML but it's a local minimum. For animals, weight is a type of strength, for software, popularity is a type of strength. It is really hard to beat something that's installed everywhere.