It's clear that the web has outgrown its original intent. Instead of just being a simple substrate for linked documents, many (if not most) websites are now trying to emulate applications, platforms, and services using the poor, ill-suited DOM.

But I don't think the solution is to give up. Native apps are great, but there's a vast gulf between the binary running on your device and the server you got it from. Downloading and updating take forever. Connecting to other apps is barely possible. Everything is horribly siloed. The brilliance of the web is that it allows people to quickly connect to computers anywhere in the world and get at whatever stuff they might want to serve; native apps will never have that level of flexibility, barring some horrible proprietary ecosystem.

Unfortunately, the web was designed primarily with content in mind, not presentation. The only way servers can provide interesting and slick user experiences is to hack up the content presentation system, which is as silly as using spreadsheet scripting to build enterprise software.

So I think the best approach would be to revisit the design of the web. Instead of having the web be strictly document-centric, I think there should be a higher level above that, through which HTML, CSS, the DOM, and everything else are implemented. A sandboxed, scriptable, low-level canvas that only gives you the bare essentials, allowing you to create native-quality experiences without having to piggyback on the DOM or reinvent the universe via canvas or WebGL. A "Vulkan" equivalent for web software. Not making a document? Feel free to not use HTML — or only embed it in the parts of your web-app that actually present content.

It should be possible for a user to go to facebook.com and immediately retrieve an equivalent to the Facebook app in their browser — smooth scrolling, gestures, and everything. (Or whatever the future equivalent of a browser might be.) But if a user navigates to a simple blog, it should still appear as it does in the web today, because this new web would be a superset of today's web.

We've been interacting with other computers through a seriously constrained pipeline this past decade. Instead of bowing our heads and conceding defeat, why not blow it wide open?