> The cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable.
No, no it's not, it's really not. You're already writing your SPAs with a REST backend, right? Well, guess what: static HTML & REST go together like burgers & beer! All you need to do is add an HTML content renderer to your REST backend, and you have _something_ someone can use to interact with.
> The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. Some people like to think of the web as just hyper text, and everything on it should be human parse-able. For me, as someone who has come late to the game, it has never seemed that way. The web is where I go to do things: work, learn, consume, watch, play. It's a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life.
True fact: learning, consuming & watching are all well-supported by static HTML.
> But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.
Part of the problem is that we're not advancing technologically: we're getting bogged down in the La Brean morass which is modern web development. HTML is a terrible but acceptable markup language; CSS is an ugly but somewhat acceptable styling language; the DOM is as hideous as a Gorgon; JavaScript is approximately the worst language ever; the combination of all the above is grotesque, and an ongoing indictment of our entire industry.
A cross-platform application-distribution standard sounds pretty awesome, but that's not what web pages are supposed to be, and it's not what web browsers should deliver. The web is a web of hyperlinked documents. It's right there in its name. And anyone who demands that his readers enable a somewhat cross-platform, highly insecure, privacy-devouring application-distribution tool in order to read his text is welcome to take a long walk off of a short pier.
HTML is certainly not a 'terrible but acceptable markup language'. Used properly, it's a _fine_ markup language. CSS is brilliant, at least in its original incarnations: it's bloated beyond repair now.
The web used to be a web of hyperlinked documents. This has not been the case for a long time now. Webapps have evolved to enable widespread communication, collaboration, gaming, social media, and so much more.
It's the single-largest open platform that's available from nearly any device in the world. It's a little more than a document viewer.
'Web apps' are still irrelevant to the mainstream web user. Unless you think that Facebook counts as a 'web app'. Facebook is a great example of a website that very much feels like a website: it's full of hyperlinks.
No, no it's not, it's really not. You're already writing your SPAs with a REST backend, right? Well, guess what: static HTML & REST go together like burgers & beer! All you need to do is add an HTML content renderer to your REST backend, and you have _something_ someone can use to interact with.
> The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. Some people like to think of the web as just hyper text, and everything on it should be human parse-able. For me, as someone who has come late to the game, it has never seemed that way. The web is where I go to do things: work, learn, consume, watch, play. It's a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life.
True fact: learning, consuming & watching are all well-supported by static HTML.
> But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.
Part of the problem is that we're not advancing technologically: we're getting bogged down in the La Brean morass which is modern web development. HTML is a terrible but acceptable markup language; CSS is an ugly but somewhat acceptable styling language; the DOM is as hideous as a Gorgon; JavaScript is approximately the worst language ever; the combination of all the above is grotesque, and an ongoing indictment of our entire industry.
A cross-platform application-distribution standard sounds pretty awesome, but that's not what web pages are supposed to be, and it's not what web browsers should deliver. The web is a web of hyperlinked documents. It's right there in its name. And anyone who demands that his readers enable a somewhat cross-platform, highly insecure, privacy-devouring application-distribution tool in order to read his text is welcome to take a long walk off of a short pier.