The entire posts reads like an old man complaining about kids on his lawn.
The justification is just .. dumb. First because the debate is over. People want to build web apps, and they want to consume web apps. 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.
Second, there is this arbitrary expectation of what the web should be. Who says the people of 1995 got the web completely right?! It's like we should have just ended innovation back in the mid 90s because the pinnacle of perfection has been reached.
>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 (I don't want to debate web page vs web app). We had web applications before Javascript client-side became big, except everything was rendered on the server, and required reloads for most state changes. It was a largely a shitty experience. It was shitty for developers who had to write it, and shitty for users, who had to use it. But still, it conveyed huge benefits over corresponding installed applications. Your quintessential web-app back in the day was web-mail.
The original vision of HTML as only hyper-linked document markup probably lasted all of a year before we began abusing it to build things outside of the original scope.
>Perhaps we could go a step further and share the whitelists and blacklists.
Definitely within the ethos of the web.