I’m done with the web

Every good web application beats its desktop rivals simply by being ubiquitious. People who dismiss the web typically ignore this simple fact completely. But it's always been true, you can look back to 1997 when Yahoo Mail killed the desktop email client business not by being flashier or better (it had full-page refreshes over 56k modems, awful!) but because you didn't have to ever worry about not having access to your email again.

I am also a strong advocate of web apps and have been for a long time. Reality has proven out my position as, as has mentioned, the web won the presentation tier (clearly this has nothing at all to do with data processing or database or system programming or anything of the sort).

In any discussion on web apps they are always held against an illusory foe that is all capable and all perfect. Let's get specific however -- I love Rdio and love their web app. They came out with a new .NET client so I of course gave it a whirl.

Worse, slower interface. Constantly updating (in big monolithic chunks). Consuming hundreds of MBs of memory.

I'm not trying to criticize specifically Rdio, but I guarantee that initiative started with someone slamming the web and its crazy mishmash of standards, promising that they'd do something that would exploit the full power of the client. The result was something much worse, holding the single and only advantage of "not in a web browser" (for what that's worth?). Amazon has fielded various trials with various rich apps (they usually partner with Microsoft), but you've never seen them because they never have a compelling story, coming with enough detriments that it outweighs the benefits. My local library system used to have a whole nasty Java interfacing tool that was an absolutely abomination, with a horrendous rickety interface that seldom worked properly, was slow, and was a beast. They replaced it with a dramatically better web interface.

Those are all just anecdotes, but they're constant across the space. Yet every post pretends that the web is a weakling that has no merit and no advantages, completely missing why it has made all of these wins against endless competitors.

Any computer was not cheap in 1987, much less one that sported a usable GUI environment that could run something on par with HyperCard. That had nothing to do with HyperCard.

> A simple comparison of the total number of HyperCard stacks built versus the total number of Web sites built would argue otherwise.

There were far, far fewer people actually running computers, much less collaborating on the internet, 26 years ago.

> You can argue about whether HyperCard authoring is more intuitive than HTML authoring (I think it was), but as soon as the Web came along people decided for themselves which of the two they preferred to hack on.

When the web came along, Apple had already made HyperCard inaccessible by charging a significant amount of money for the authoring tools, rather than shipping it with each Mac.

Even still, people were producing "My Favorite Links" and home pages, not apps.

Sorry, you're going to need to elaborate here or else you're really sensationalist. Also, you can't be serious about the community not admitting we need to learn how to structure programs better, as if that were the only problem. I didn't learn that UNTIL I started working on the web.

It's not so hilarious if you're the one paying for bandwidth when hundreds of thousands of users are accessing your SSL site each day. Or if you're desperately trying to pull one page up quickly while on your smart phone in a region with sketchy (at best) mobile reception.

I'm one of those people who are obsessed with keeping file sizes to a minimum and, quite frankly, I find it "hilarious" when developers create sites with both a heavy bandwidth footprint and heavy CPU footprint rendering the bloody thing just because they insist users should experience a full desktop experience inside a web page. Those are different paradigms with different limitations and bottlenecks. Trying to shoehorn in a desktop paradigm (regardless of how elegant the OP might have considered Cappuccino's code) for the web simply didn't make sense back then; and that is why his project failed.

I also want to stress that I'm not against interactive sites. Obviously there is a happy medium between minimal design and the OP's vision of the web. However there have been studies that have proven that even a fraction of a second longer page load time can drive business away from your site. And given this and my former points, it makes considerable more sense to use more compact libraries to begin with.

Lastly, his point about many developers being unwilling to spend a little time learning web frameworks is something that I haven't personally encountered. But I can agree with his frustration on that specific remark if it is true.