It's also important because sometimes you want a WebAssembly instance to hold a reference to a GC object from Javascript, such as a DOM object, or be able to return a similar GC object back to Javascript or to another separate WebAssembly instance. Doing the first part alone is easy to do with a little bit of JS code (make the JS code hold a reference to the GC object, give the Wasm an id that corresponds to it, and let the Wasm import some custom JS functions that can operate on that id), but it's not composable in a way that lets the rest of those tasks work in a general way.
It's a strategy that's worked out very well. Standards groups and browsers prioritize backwards compatibility very highly. It's hard to remember any real compatibility breakages in standardized HTML/CSS/JS features (ie. not third-party plugins like Flash).
I guess it's the end of days, if tags have stopped blinking.
> And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days.
— from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10
The browsers and standards groups do prioritize backwards compatibility and have done a very good job at it. The only real web compatibility breakages I know of have to do with pre-standardized features or third-party plugins like Flash.
Other people can run AppViews too (that operate over the same or different data). There are just less people doing that than hosting Mastodon instances partly because it's much more expensive to, because some of the benefits of hosting a Mastodon instance can be obtained much cheaper through running a PDS server, and because AppViews doesn't serve the same exact social role that Mastodon instances do. (Mastodon has every instance be a semi-isolated community, so Mastodon instances are often made for the social purpose of running a semi-isolated community. Bluesky users expect a global timeline that's not partitioned by server instances, so it doesn't get many people running AppViews specifically for fostering semi-isolated communities. People on Bluesky who want to foster semi-isolated communities tend to use features like custom timelines to do so instead.)
React supports rendering to HTML ahead of time (SSR) which doesn't need any client-side javascript, and this is a prominent feature of most frameworks using React. This feature of React was one of its major innovations over many other front-end frameworks of the time.
Why would Google want to bother? Who actually uses XSLT today for making webpages? Why should browsers spend effort on supporting XML+XSLT-based pages in addition to HTML+CSS-based pages?
It's very nice to have an up-to-date writeup like this. I've gotten some odd looks for telling people that classic CSRF tokens are unnecessary work since the Origin header became widely supported, and I'm glad to have a page like this to refer people to.
Windows Vista got saner permissions support and made the OS survive certain kinds of driver crashes, but on launch a lot of existing software and drivers weren't updated to support those changes so it got a bad reputation. Nobody gave Windows proper credit for these advancements until Windows 7 which had a cleaner launch since most software and drivers were already updated for Vista's changes.
