It should be more like: what pixels is the user about to see? What data is need to set the the pixels? What data is likely needed next and optimistically pre-fetch - something like that.
I get to forget about HTML and Javascript, CSS, most of the complication of the browser and web, and just write an application in my favorite language which will run fast and deliver GL accelerated graphics to it's users.
I am really happy with WASM / WebGL for being abstractions which allows for this.
Cool that you’re creating an actual desktop-style gl app with it.
Another minor annoyance is that 'cargo bloat' and similar tools don't yet have backends for wasm, so I need to fix up the native build to make use of that sort of analysis, which I'd like, because I serve the whole application from microcontroller flash where I only have 4 - 16mb to hold application and firmware, including the http server and network stack.
I learned how to build for the web by looking at webpages and seeing how they worked. What you're describing is the switch from circuit boards of discrete components to everything in a single microscopic IC under a blob of epoxy.
Like you, a part of me years for SGML and The Semantic Web, and where it makes sense in Alumina I am using RESTish APIs.
But I do not pine for Javascript. Language or frameworks. 20 years has been enough. And I do not believe that some of the 4mb minified obfuscated js downloads from a CDN I've seen are in any way more accessible than a WASM binary of similar size. At least there is advanced tooling for the WASM representation. Folks who want you to read their code will still make it easy, and folks who don't won't.
To your point about learning, WASM makes some really incredible systems like https://lovr.org/ available in the browser, which I would have loved to have as a kid, but which also aren't javascript. It's related to Turing completeness somehow, once you let a little software into your structured document, it all wants in. Or maybe it's "if you give a mouse a cookie"?
I understand what you're saying about discoverability. But the developer in me really likes having a relatively simple binary interpreter to target for network-delivered cross-platform binary applications. My hope is that offering such a juicy target to the folks who want to develop applications (including myself) gets them out of all the semantic document features, allowing both sets of code to get simpler and more focused. Because I think they're two different, both entirely valid, tasks folks use the web for.