My comment wasn't addressed at practitioners developing web apps so much as a response to principled criticism of the Web architecture as application development platform. As the author of TFA says he's coming from a Windows desktop app development background, praising early-90s RAD environments such as FoxPro for their superior workflow and adequateness for the job of creating business apps.
Then why not use those tools rather than the Web? But the author insists
> The last thing I want to see is us going back to native development as the first line for development. The Web has always been the future for application development and I believe it will go all the way in the end. I believe in the Web as a platform and I want it to stay as the dominant platform.
Why does the Web have to be everything to everybody, gaining incredible complexity to the point that it's useless as a standard because we're never going to see new independent implementations from scratch?
Re WHATWG: I don't think HTML5 is bad, but it must be said that it was the late 2000s "HTML5 rocks" propaganda making plugins (Flash and Java) unfashionable for better or worse. Turned out the offered overlapping and partially implemented alternatives (Canvas API, declarative CSS animations and shapes, SVG) were lacking, and didn't address the principal use cases. Those being describing highly interactive apps, controlled piercing of Web sandboxes for integration with native file systems and devices, etc.
> Then why not use those tools rather than the Web?
I think the author of the article writes from the app developer perspective - his users are on the web and due to it's reach he's stuck there. He does appear to be cheering on the web as the application platform, but that might be the most reasonable way forward just because of it's momentum. And it is somewhat decent app development platform.
All of this comes at the cost of large amount of complexity, there I agree.
Then why not use those tools rather than the Web? But the author insists
> The last thing I want to see is us going back to native development as the first line for development. The Web has always been the future for application development and I believe it will go all the way in the end. I believe in the Web as a platform and I want it to stay as the dominant platform.
Why does the Web have to be everything to everybody, gaining incredible complexity to the point that it's useless as a standard because we're never going to see new independent implementations from scratch?
Re WHATWG: I don't think HTML5 is bad, but it must be said that it was the late 2000s "HTML5 rocks" propaganda making plugins (Flash and Java) unfashionable for better or worse. Turned out the offered overlapping and partially implemented alternatives (Canvas API, declarative CSS animations and shapes, SVG) were lacking, and didn't address the principal use cases. Those being describing highly interactive apps, controlled piercing of Web sandboxes for integration with native file systems and devices, etc.