What is so great about HTML5 and JS for me, the user? That you can get my location? That you can have video (just like Flash, except slower)? Or is it that you can store stuff on my machine?
HTML5 is one more step in the direction of web pages pretending to be applications.
Reading about "the web" on HN is like reading the story of Icarus. HN'ers are so enchanted by web apps that they forget they can only fly on the web thanks to native software. They would like to replace everything with a browser.
> That you can have video (just like Flash, except slower)?
Actually HTML5 is faster, and Flash is slower [for me]. So video on the web is a big deal with HTML5.
> HTML5 is one more step in the direction of web pages pretending to be applications.
No, it is one more step in the direction of web pages becoming applications. You can't possibly tell me that Gmail isn't a full application! It's much faster and more responsive than any desktop mail client I've ever seen: searching mail takes < 1 second vs 1-2 minutes in Outlook. It's better in every way. And it's on the web.
Personally, I just find web applications extremely painful to develop (on all the frameworks/dev environments I've tried, not just Microsoft ones). Desktop development is a lot more fun, but web apps are where the jobs are these days, unfortunately.
Actually all those things are great for the user. As for HN'ers it probably means they can do more things for people at lower cost, since business ideas realized as web apps are less tied to silo-like platforms.
Do you have an actual argument about why web applications are inferior to native applications? You're just stating a lot of things ("HTML5 is one more step in the direction of web pages pretending to be applications.", we "would like to replace everything with a browser") without really explaining why they're bad.
Reading about "the web" on HN is like reading the story of Icarus. HN'ers are so enchanted by web apps that they forget they can only fly on the web thanks to native software. They would like to replace everything with a browser.