Almanac.httparchive.org: WebAssembly 2020

[rviscomi]

Part [Num] Chapter [Num]: WebAssembly

Content team

| Authors | Reviewers | Analysts | Draft | Queries | Results |
| ------- | --------- | -------- | ----- | ------- | ------- |
| TBD | TBD | TBD | Doc | *.sql | Sheet |

Content team lead: TBD

Welcome chapter contributors! You'll be using this issue throughout the chapter lifecycle to coordinate on the content planning, analysis, and writing stages.

The content team is made up of the following contributors:

• Authors
• Reviewers
• Analysts

New contributors: If you're interested in joining the content team for this chapter, just leave a comment below and the content team lead will loop you in.

_Note: To ensure that you get notifications when tagged, you must be "watching" this repository._

Milestones

0. Form the content team

• [ ] Jul 6th: Project owners have selected an author to be the content team lead
• [ ] Jul 13th: The content team has at least one author, reviewer, and analyst (minimally viable team formed)

1. Plan content

• [ ] Jul 20th: The content team has completed the chapter outline in the draft doc
• [ ] Jul 27th: Analysts have triaged the feasibility of all proposed metrics

2. Gather data

• [ ] Jul 27th: Analysts have prepared all feasible metrics for testing and added queries to the sql directory
• Aug 1 - 31: August crawl
• [ ] Sep 7th: Analysts have queried all metrics and saved the output to the results sheet

3. Validate results

• [ ] Sep 14th: The content team has reviewed the results sheet

4. Draft content

• [ ] Oct 12th: Authors have completed the first draft in the doc
• [ ] Oct 26th: The content team has prototyped all data visualizations

5. Publication

• [ ] Oct 26th: The content team has reviewed the final draft, converted to markdown, and filed a PR to add it to the 2020 content directory
• Nov 9th: Target launch date

[rviscomi]

Page Content

Some of my concerns as a reviewer last year have been around lacking / incomplete stats for WebAssembly; do you think it's something we could explicitly include this year?

It's a fairly mature technology by now, and for many it would be interesting to see and track how Web uses it over time.

_Originally posted by @RReverser in https://github.com/HTTPArchive/almanac.httparchive.org/issues/876#issuecomment-644452800_

@RReverser I'd love to drill down into this topic. Which chapter do you think WebAssembly best fits? I'm also curious what metrics/stats you think are important for measuring the state of wasm and how we can match those up with the capabilities of the HTTP Archive dataset.

One area I'm open to exploring this year is to include more topics that may not necessarily be easily quantifiable. Even if wasm isn't easily measurable in this dataset, it's still a significant enough topic that it's worth discussing at least in anecdotal/experiential terms. For example, UI design patterns may be something really hard to measure and detect, but design experts know what the trends are through experience and could write about that.

[RReverser]

I commented with "Page Content" because that seems like most reasonable category. And I think it should be perfectly measurable, with pretty much same metrics as any other content, the closest one being JavaScript, since both are code shipped on the Web, just coming from different languages.

[rviscomi]

Ok thanks for clarifying!

The JS chapter's metrics include things like popular frameworks/libraries, distribution of byte sizes, feature adoption, distribution of CPU timings, etc. I'm not too familiar with WebAssembly; how much of it is transparent enough for us to attribute these metrics to? For example:

• does a given website use wasm?
• what is the payload size of the wasm resource?
• what features does it make use of?
• what tools were used to develop it?

Do we have the telemetry in WebPageTest to answer these kinds of questions?

We're also considering a new chapter on Fugu / Web Capabilities. Does this kind of fall into that category or is JS a better fit?

[bazzadp]

I think it warrants its own chapter as don’t think it really fits it any others. However only if there’s enough content (and particularly measurable stats) to make that worthwhile.

[RReverser]

• does a given website use wasm?

• what is the payload size of the wasm resource?

I think these are available for any subresources, so should be included for Wasm as well.

• what features does it make use of?

• what tools were used to develop it?

These, however, are more complicated. I doubt anyone has data on the last one (there is a corresponding informational section in Wasm, but I'm fairly sure that most devs strip it before deployment), and the former is probably available only in Chrome counters or by manually fetching & analysing each Wasm subresource.

[rviscomi]

@RReverser what Wasm related Chrome counters do we have available? What other useful stats might be feasible?

[rviscomi]

@RReverser any recommendations for who could author this chapter? Alternatively, in which chapter do you think it might be a better fit as a subsection? As of now we don't have any staffing so need to explore backup options.

[bazzadp]

@phamann any interest? After your great talk on this at PerfNow?

[rviscomi]

Unfortunately there are no interested contributors for this topic, so I'll close this issue and we can fold the content into the relevant chapters.

[nrllh]

@rviscomi I plan a subsection for WebAssembly in Security Chapter. People can reach there some stats regarding to Webassembly usage, so that should fit well.