[Animats]

Web apps are mostly conceptually simple: a thin client which is basically a UI framework talks to a process on a remote server. So you need something to develop the UI and something for the server. But instead of the “web UI toolkit” (which could mostly be a graphical tool) we have JavaScript, CSS, HTML, jquery, a gazillion hacked front end frameworks trying to (imperfectly) fix the mistakes of everything below it, a whole system for preprocessing, packaging, running tasks, deploying - just for a UI.

Exactly. So what do we have coming next? WebAssembly.

[randomsearch]

WebAssembly sounds great, although you could argue that running things in a sandboxed JVM in the 1990s was basically there already.

But it doesn't magically remove the problems we have made, for no real reason, at the front end in terms of UI.