It’s time to kill the web app

The 2arguments presented are: 1)Reinventing the 90s - Why is this necessarily a bad thing? The author links to a blog post discussing how Flux is similar to Windows 1.0 but that author of that post does not claim that makes Flux bad. In fact they agree it works well and scales well as well. The only thing they say is that based on the experience in the 90s it’s likely we will have further developments on this model. Why should those developments not be on the web platform itself (also who thinks that if we are gonna start a completely new platform we wouldn’t reinvent the 90s on it again?).

2. Impossible to secure - Yes security is a huge issue with the web. But a large part of that is older designs and many have been mitigated (as an example, the wiki section the author links to show why JSON is insecure has 2insecurities. Security issues in parser implementations which are not written in web technologies anyways and the fact that before 2009 and the widespread availability of JSON.parse and JSON.stringify people used eval to parse JSON).

I’ll be honest that I do think the web needs to be improved/changes/replaced. I don’t think this article makes the point well and possibly focuses on the wrong things. But my biggest concern is with the idea that improvements need to be achieved by replacing the web instead of the kind of incremental improvement we are already seeing.

I would be interested in Part 2 to see if the replacement the author has in mind is really worth it. It would need to at least be an order of magnitude better to sacrifice the compatibility advantages the web has, but it may still be worthwhile to think of what a platform written today from scratch would look like to focus the kind of improvements we would like to see on the web.

There is a section heading that reads, “Why the web must die.” I almost stopped reading there. I value the web for its longevity, accessibility, and non-proprietary nature.

There are some goods points made in this article, however:

> My experience has been that attempting to hire a web developer that has even heard of all [the above-mentioned security] landmines always ends in failure, let alone hiring one who can reliably avoid them. Hence my conclusion: if you can’t hire web devs that understand how to write secure web apps then writing secure web apps is impossible.

Apart from some justified points on how confusing origins can be, the author fundamentally misunderstands Web development.

Not only do users want fast sites and multiple of them open, so the performance point bears little weight, but the authors points to OOP techniques, presenting them as necessarily superior to FRP because they came later to Windows.

Next the criticism on productivity and size of developer teams. Productivity has gone up tremendously in my experience e.g. by doing universal apps using React/Webpack/CSS Modules and following FRP principles, all of which you can do while maintaining Web semantics. If you haven't noticed gains in productivity, your workflow is wrong and you aren't taking advantage of the current tools. From my point of view, things used to be much worse and it is finally maturing.

I won't bother commenting on the rest because the article just go down from there in confusion mixing up services with applications. The author just basically wants to write desktop apps, but also be able to take advantage of the Web's discoverability.

I agree, this article doesn't make any sense without proposing an alternative. Sure, I think most people would agree that the web is still a bit rough for (large) apps. (compared to desktop apps) But nothing that can't be fixed, right?

I can't imaging that native phone apps will still be popular in 10 years. I think that they will be replaced by the web in a similar fashion as web-apps have replaced desktop apps.

> but the web app only sucks if you're using the stuff that sucks.

Please show me anything that doesn't suck on the web. And yes, I've been doing web development for close to 17 years now.

There's almost nothing that doesn't suck on the web. The languages, the tooling, the platform - you name it. It is good for one thing, and one thing only: displaying single-page interlinked documents with little to no embedded media. Any and all other attempts to make it do anything else end up bloated incomplete internally inconsistent overlapping monstrosities.