*Well, that's quite geeky, but also quite interesting. I was wondering under what pretexts the World Wide Web would be abandoned. The writer/coder here lists a whole bunch of them.
The world wide web is being killed, mostly by criminals
(...)
HTML 5 is a plague on our industry. Whilst it does a few things well those advantages can be easily matched by other app platforms, yet virtually none of the web’s core design flaws can be fixed. This is why the web lost on mobile: when presented with competing platforms that were actually designed instead of organically grown, developers almost universally chose to go native. But we lack anything good outside of mobile. We desperately need a way of conveniently distributing sandboxed, secure, auto-updating apps to desktops and laptops.
Ten years ago I’d have been crucified for writing this article. I expect some grumbling now too, but in recent times it’s become socially acceptable to criticise the web. Way back then, the web was locked in a competition with other proprietary platforms like Flash, Shockwave and Java. The web was open but it’s survival as a competitive platform wasn’t clear. Its eventual resurgence and victory is a story calculated to push all our emotional buttons: open is better than closed, collective ownership is better than proprietary, David can beat Goliath etc. Many programmers developed a tribal loyalty to it. Prefixing anything with “Web” made it instantly hip. Suggesting that Macromedia Flash might actually be good would get your geek card revoked.
But times change. The web has grown so fat that calling it open is now pretty meaningless: you have no chance of implementing HTML5 unless you have a few billion dollars you’d like to burn. The W3C didn’t meet its users needs and is now irrelevant, so unless you work at Google or Microsoft you can’t meaningfully impact the technical direction of the web. Some of the competing platforms that were once closed opened up. And the JavaScript ecosystem is imploding under the weight of its own pointless churn.
It’s time to go back to the drawing board....
(((While it's always possible to go back to a drawing board, sometimes it makes no sense. One could reinvent the magic lantern with solar-powered LEDs, but who would use it?)))
