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by exception_e 3404 days ago
I do see your point, but I personally like the delineation of "web app" being something that has higher modern web requirements and "website" being something that should work on something like IE9.

That is not to say that UX should be thrown out of the window for the former, of course.

I do agree that something like NYT shouldn't be a web app.

EDIT: I should mention that a lot of these things come down to requirements, of course. I don't think it's fair to say that every web app must be PWA compliant... it depends!
1 comments
lucideer 3404 days ago
I don't see that such a delineation serves any useful purpose though. Does it?

The biggest argument seems to be laziness: "Progressive enhancement is hard, here's a term that I can apply liberally to give myself an excuse not to bother". That may make a good business argument on a case-by-case basis, but it's not an absolute, and I don't see why it necessarily applies to webapps but not to websites.

Also, React has made progressive enhancement a lot easier than it used to be

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exception_e 3404 days ago
+1 on your point about React making progressive enhancement easier. This repo and related technologies are rather neat!

> The biggest argument seems to be laziness: "Progressive enhancement is hard, here's a term that I can apply liberally to give myself an excuse not to bother".

It's always going to come down to the requirements and an understanding of who is using your web app.

In some cases, you should absolutely optimize for PWA... Facebook, for example, is a webapp that considers users in developing countries with shotty networks. They also optimize for those with blindness.

Implementing those features in a webapp like Kibana (visualizer for elasticsearch data) would be a wasted effort given the user demographic and the purpose of the app.

TL;DR: "It depends"

EDIT: I just realized I may not have addressed your point " I don't see why it necessarily applies to webapps but not to websites.". I think the answer is simply "Webapps are inherently more complex than websites, therefore, more strict web requirements need to be met". This is an easy way to compartmentalize it, but isn't an absolute.

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