Hacker News Reader

I can't even read the text. I'm guessing it's something about "over-complicating web development" or something similar?

It's a thread, started about 2004-ish, apparently updated through 2011-ish, complaining that people should use native apps instead of web apps. It starts with the premise that using HTML to implement an application is abusive, since it was developed as a document display language, not an app framework.

They focus a lot on E-Mule as a non-HTML-based, native web app. (someone else eventually points out that it doesn't fit the customary definition of "web app").

E-Mule isn't a web app at all, it's just an Internet application. The fact that we have so confused the Internet and the WWW, to the point that even people complaining about WWW conflate it with the Internet, is a fucking tragedy.

I think that their argument (translated from rant) is basically that the web should be used for documents, and that we should build some other internet-based technology to implement applications on top of. It doesn't seem like there was a whole lot of justification beyond "this isn't what HTML was designed for", "Javascript bad", and "native app good".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com