This is a very good point. Perhaps it is time to think about what a modern web truly should be.
The web has many things going for it. It's no mystery why it's so popular. It's the leading platform to share information and media with the world. It is also a platform for apps that have a unique and very powerful advantage: you can just link to an app and you can use it just a couple seconds later, everything is automatically saved and loadable from any web-connected device, and if you don't want to use it again you can simply forget about it. This is a much nicer experience compared to manually downloading and installing/extracting an app.
However, the web has many serious problems. The web originated in the early 90s as a way to browse text and images, and new things have been haphazardly stacked on top of that over time, resulting in what we have today. It is a lot trickier to make dynamic content for the web than it should be. Due to the limitations of JavaScript, its web API and the web overall, anything scripted for the web browser feels like it's a flimsy hack. People have made much software to try to make things more sane--jQuery, CoffeeScript, GWT, etc.--but they can't solve the deep architectural problems that the platform faces. The time we could be spending focusing on making cool things is lost trying to wrestle with web browsers to get them to do what we want them to do. That's a huge loss in productivity.
We would all benefit if we redesigned the web from the ground-up.
The web has many things going for it. It's no mystery why it's so popular. It's the leading platform to share information and media with the world. It is also a platform for apps that have a unique and very powerful advantage: you can just link to an app and you can use it just a couple seconds later, everything is automatically saved and loadable from any web-connected device, and if you don't want to use it again you can simply forget about it. This is a much nicer experience compared to manually downloading and installing/extracting an app.
However, the web has many serious problems. The web originated in the early 90s as a way to browse text and images, and new things have been haphazardly stacked on top of that over time, resulting in what we have today. It is a lot trickier to make dynamic content for the web than it should be. Due to the limitations of JavaScript, its web API and the web overall, anything scripted for the web browser feels like it's a flimsy hack. People have made much software to try to make things more sane--jQuery, CoffeeScript, GWT, etc.--but they can't solve the deep architectural problems that the platform faces. The time we could be spending focusing on making cool things is lost trying to wrestle with web browsers to get them to do what we want them to do. That's a huge loss in productivity.
We would all benefit if we redesigned the web from the ground-up.