The web was conceived for hypertext and doesn't do a bad job of it.
The actual problem is that people took something that was always intended for displaying (illustrated but mainly text) documents that happened to have clickable words that would display other documents, and tried to make it do desktop-style applications too. We've been hammering square pegs into round holes ever since.
And the infuriating thing is we had a great system for doing what HTML+JS+AJAX etc etc does now - it was called NEWS. But those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, first as tragedy and then as farce. Not sure which stage we're on now, maybe both.
That's exactly what I was going to say. It was never meant for all of this in the first place. We've spent millions of man-hours trying to turn a squirrel into a dinosaur.
Worse yet, it's becoming more and more difficult to simply read the freaking web as a series of documents, which was the entire purpose in the first place. There's TOS, pages that don't work without JS, and so on. I fully expect publishers to try to force legislation to require people to download all this crap simply to read an essay, whether they want to or not.
We had a nice hammer, and we're doing a pretty good job of pounding everything else in the universe into various versions of a nail. But it's ugly.
NeWS was a lovely thing (and the HyperNeWS environment that was built on it is still one of all time favourite frameworks) but I'm not sure it was directly comparable with HTML+JS+AJAX - it was more like an attempt to do a better X11.
Specifically I don't remember (even, ironically given its name, in HyperNews) there being much support for working with documents or hyperlinks. Mind you - it did do the client side scripting in a wonderful way (at least if PostScript is your thing).
I also seem to remember that it didn't have a particularly strong security model?
Indeed, NeWS was at the level of X11, but tuned to the hardware and networking set up we ended up having instead of the DEC 11/750<-very fast fiberoptic link->[display head with a 68000, 1MiB of memory, ~1 megapixels, i.e. pretty dumb, all this to get around government procurement law], but with Sun insisting on 6 figures to license it, it didn't have a chance.
Supposedly the major reason James Gosling insisted Sun not charge for Java runtimes and the SDK, he didn't want another major effort of his to fail for the same reason.
They are all variants on the cross-platform thin-client theme. The HTML+JS+AJAX conglomeration has certainly more in common with NeWS than it does with the web I remember in 1994, which was a solution to the problem of sharing and cross referencing scientific papers and similar documents.
Yeah - I suppose that is fair. Certainly with HyperNeWS the fun[1] was creating a user interface interactively and then connecting it to your back end application via message passing.
1. And it certainly was fun - HyperNeWS was brilliant (e.g. I remember drawing a "broken window" of multiple unconnected parts, pasting it as the shape of a terminal window and everything continued to work - this was '91 or '92).
Also I vaguely remember logging into another users environment and manually tweaking the transformation matrix for the terminal window they were using to rotate it very slightly as they were working...
I don't think that the web as a mechanism for distributing applications would look much different even if it hadn't gone through the HTML stage. If not JS, it would have been Java applets. If not HTML, then some weird XML layout schema.
There might have been a time where the web as a platform for applications was beyond silly, but this is not htat time. The platform is decidedly for shipping applications as well as pages.
Well, when HTML/CSS/JS are the only tool for the job, they're the right tool for the job, that's for sure.
Maybe HTML5 isn't the best option for mobile apps, but they can be used, and it even has advantages in some areas (ease of cross-platform development, for instance)
The actual problem is that people took something that was always intended for displaying (illustrated but mainly text) documents that happened to have clickable words that would display other documents, and tried to make it do desktop-style applications too. We've been hammering square pegs into round holes ever since.
And the infuriating thing is we had a great system for doing what HTML+JS+AJAX etc etc does now - it was called NEWS. But those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, first as tragedy and then as farce. Not sure which stage we're on now, maybe both.