[alchemical]

> Can be viewed with a radically stripped-down web browser.

Like Lynx?

In terms of sites versus apps, I think the browser vendors are responsible for making this happen. Adobe AIR was the closest effort I saw of marrying web technologies with apps.

Sadly AIR never took off and whilst I appreciate the intention, it left a huge looming question of what do we actually do with all this new web technology?.

One answer I came up with in recent years was what you suggested: of partitioning off the people who want to work with the technologies and keep them separate from the text+image+CSS based web we've all grown to love.

Similar to how the demo-scene was an offshoot of game development...