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I didn't see it as rage. It simply pointed out that the web as it exists is a document format that had self modification, and then full apps bolted onI dunno, it looked pretty aggressive to me. There was maybe a kernel of fact, but mostly opinion:
> As a platform for developing interactive applications the web is simply terrible.
Many disagree. Many would rather use Electron than native apps & find it nicer.
> There is no good way to develop a UI in HTML/CSS/JS, all attempts to do so rely on layers upon layers of wat are essentially hacks to build something resembling a UI toolkit on top of a document markup language.
I laughed out loud. There were already interactive buttons & form controls from the start. Vanilla JS is fine today. One of the web's strongest suits is that you can take a static page & sprinkle in just a little interactivity, just a little applicationization, if you want. Ultra-thin ultra-simple libraries like Enhance are doing great to provide just a little common shape & definition, tiny code but some norms & practices to adopt. It can be extremely incremental to move from document to application, with very little work at each step. We see what we want to see, and a lot of people want to see it as hard, as hugely complicated, but here's an industry heads down cranking without a ton of internal complaint, plenty of simple ways of doing things, and plenty of people doing fine.
> The result a UI that is unnecessarily complicated and fragile.
Sources wanted. Not all sites are perfect but a huge amount of things work very well. And unlike apps, users have a toolkit of capabilities they can learn & apply everywhere to help them (forward, back, bookmark, share link). Extensions let users go further than apps permit. Again, it's just, like, ya'll's downer opinion, man.
Anyhow, I like your note on hope. A lot. I don't see this ancestor post as having much hope there; it seemed set up to ruin. Trying to identify more constructive opportunities, trying to figure out new architectures we might layer onto the platform: that stuff should be exciting.
One place I lose excitement rapidly though is replacing the web with rendered canvases, as you say here:
> I am hoping that wasm and webgl can bypass html css and js for people who just want to make a webapp.
This is my nightmare. If folks want to do something else, fine, go somewhere else. But don't break the web. Don't break every user agent. Don't break view source, scraping, & accessibility tools. Just because alternate paradigms are succeeding as much as laserdisc doesn't mean they should come in & break the web next. That should be enragening.
The web is for more than pushing pixels into peoples faces. There's some value here, some shared expected experience, & coming in crashing it all because the only stakeholder you can imagine is those who "just want to make a [not-so-web]app" and damn all the rest.
I've had this bone to pick with Flutter, which is doing this imperialistic web takeover plan with CanvasKit, effectively turning the browser into a vnc session for an app. Incredibly hostile & deeply cruel way to snub hypertext & make yourself unintelligible to the rest of the ecosystem.
(The "direct calls into the DOM" wasm desires are going to be a bit chaotic & hurtful to view-source, but we've already made that hard; so ok, fine, and yeah, it is exciting to give people a post-JS web.)