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.
HTML/CSS/JS is the only fully open stack, free as in beer and free and not owned by a single entity and standardized by multinational standardization bodies for building applications interfaces that is cross platform and does that excellent. Especially with electron you can build native apps with HTML/CSS/JS.
There are actually web apps not „websites” that are built. Web apps are not html with sprinkled jquery around there are actually heavy apps.
Everyone writing about "future view" or "next gen" would have to prove to me that they really understand current state of things.
I like reminding students about Steve Jobs. While others pushed for web apps, he launched the App Store alongside the iPhone in 2008 and changed everything. I ask my students, why not stick with web apps? Why go native?
Hopefully, these questions get them thinking about new platforms, new technologies and solutions, and maybe even spark ideas that lead to something better.
Just picture this: it's 2007, and you're standing in front of Steve Jobs telling him: “You don't understand anything about the web, Steve.”
Yeah, good luck with that. For that reason I'll politely decline your offer to prove how much I know about this topic, but you're more than welcome to share your own perspective.
The binary is a compressed artefact and the stream is a TLS pipe. But the principle is the same.
In fact videos streams over the web are actually based on how HTTP documents are chunked and retrieved, rather than the other way around.
My goal was to question the way we do things. Game streaming, for example, works differently. The game runs entirely on a remote server. The server has a GPU/CPU combo that renders the game in real time and user input is sent back to the server via UDP/WebRTC or a TCP tunnel.
Also, native mobile apps work quite differently from both video and game streaming.
Bottom line: we've seen some great innovations over the last 35 years, and I'm hoping to see plenty more. The most important thing is to question everything we do, to have that "yes, but why?" mindset.
Video streaming is still HTTP and the data is chunked. The reason data is chunked is so that you can have adaptive bitrate. Ie if one chunk takes too long to download then the next chunk will be the same time slice but at a lower bitrate. All served over HTTP.
HTTP itself has evolved massively over the years too. HTTP3 is actually a binary protocol built on top of UDP.
You’ve got the right attitude questioning why things are. But you’re also not alone. Which is why modern HTTP doesn’t look anything like its 90s predecessor and why so many public facing systems have adopted HTTP.
You do see proprietary video streaming protocols too. But the reason they’re not generally used for public-facing services is the same reason HTTP is everywhere: firewalls and routers work fine with HTTP because HTTP is ubiquitous. Whereas proprietary formats, and particularly ones based on UDP, don’t always play nicely with routers and firewalls.
In fact UDP in particular is a troublesome datagram for routing.
I’ve worked in the broadcasting sector for a while but it’s been a long long time since I’ve worked in the games industry. So I don’t know what is commonly used for game streaming. But for video streaming, they moved away from proprietary protocols to HTTP. As latency drops and bandwidth increases, I would expect to see the same trend with game streaming too.
2. Everything in our world is dwarfes standing on the shoulders of giants. To rip everything up and create something completely new is most of the time an idea that sounds better than it really would be. Anyone who thinks something else is mostly to young to see this pattern.