Arrogant, unnecessary opening. Your reasons had better be good.
First because the debate is over.
Clearly it isn't.
People want to build web apps, and they want to consume
web apps.
"People" don't want to build anything; it's devs who want to do that. People want to do all kinds of things on the web. Often, they want to spend as little time on your site as possible so they can get back to whatever they were doing before. They want consistency, predictability, familiarity. They want their browser to work the same on your site as it does any other site they visit.
We had the same debate with Flash. All designers loved it and couldn't help but do "cool" stuff with it. The general public mostly just complained that it was annoying and didn't work as expected.
You can certainly stay on the side-lines, complain and
yearn for the 90s and those glorious days of geocities
and 'proper' web pages, but the world has moved on.
Hmm, were you blowing a raspberry as you wrote that
...I see the next point is more hand waving...
>As Jeremy points out, a web app seems to be nothing but a
web site that requires JavaScript.
No, it's not. A web application is an application that runs
in the browser
And this is why you don't get it. There is no binary here, it's a continuum. The kind of web app you're talking about is the kind of site that would require JS and the kind of site that the author would whitelist. Incidentally, it's also the kind of site I write for a living.
Those aren't the sites the author is talking about.
>"People" don't want to build anything; it's devs who want to do that.
+1 for pedantry. Apparently devs aren't people, they are "people" (or is it the other way around).
>People want to do all kinds of things on the web.
That's right. They want to do all kinds of things on it. They want to hang out on facebook, check gmail, keep track of twitter feed, write documents in google docs, and upload to flickr. All those "web sites" really stretch the original vision of what HTML was supposed to be, and what the author is arguing for. They are all JavaScript heavy not because Devs love JavaScript (it's a shitty language), but because it's the only way to provide a proper experience for the end-users.
>We had the same debate with Flash.
We didn't have the same 'debate', because there's no debate. End-users aren't complaining about the current state of the web. Devs aren't complaining either. There's no movement to push the web in the other direction. Users, developers and all major internet corporations are pretty much aligned. Most of the focus is on things like privacy, not on reducing the use of JavaScritpt.
>There is no binary here, it's a continuum
Actually I purposely used "application" because I wanted to reinforce the point that some things that run in the browser are applications, not pages, not marked up documents, applications. Furthermore those web applications may not necessarily require javascript - that's how they are written today, that's not how they were written yesterday. If you want to go into a debate as to what the difference between a 'web site' and a 'web app' is, I'd say there's a continuum there, but I focused on pure "web applications".
>The kind of web app you're talking about is the kind of site that would require JS and the kind of site that the author would whitelist.
Yes. Try browsing the web without JS enabled for a while and see how many regular sites (not apps) just fail to work. And I don't mean a JS enhancement fails to work; I mean the whole site fails to work, or even load.
We had the same debate with Flash. All designers loved it and couldn't help but do "cool" stuff with it. The general public mostly just complained that it was annoying and didn't work as expected.
Hmm, were you blowing a raspberry as you wrote that...I see the next point is more hand waving...
And this is why you don't get it. There is no binary here, it's a continuum. The kind of web app you're talking about is the kind of site that would require JS and the kind of site that the author would whitelist. Incidentally, it's also the kind of site I write for a living.Those aren't the sites the author is talking about.