At ROS Kong, some rQt on the web was demoed as well as a Gazebo web visualizer.

I am no expert in web programing but what prevents us from moving rQt and RViz to the web/javascript ? The obvious advantages would be cross-platform support, optimizations independent of the underlying libraries, easier code to debug, no compilation. Plus, there are already great tools like robotwebtools and rosbridge.

Here are a few reasons I was told that could prevent that move; are those really valid ? Are there better reasons ?

- hard to access local files (html is not aware of local files)

- no customizable shaders in WebGL (is that the case ? do we need those ?)

- slow JSON parsing libraries (aren't those optimized in recent browsers ?)

- heavy bandwidth usage (how about binary JSON ?)