[resu_nimda]

I can't remember the last time I opened a native email or word processing application on desktop. I much prefer the web experience. What makes it the wrong tool? What's the point of these silly rules?

You want to build applications? Use whatever freakin tool or platform your users will adopt. Don't be constrained by pointless prescriptivism.

[still_grokking]

It's not a "silly rule" that the web is not for application development. It's about the technology as such!

An example what I mean: One can use a stone to put nails into a wall. But a hammer is clearly the better tool for that task.

[ziftface]

But what about users who actually prefer some web applications, like the user you responded to? To them, the web application is the hammer. I mean really who gets to decide which is better besides the user?

[still_grokking]

For the user the underlying tech should be transparent. Users just want applications with common "look & feel". How that's done doesn't mater to them in the end.

That's the lesson we've learned by now in the mobile space.

But for the developers of those applications the how makes a big difference: Building apps with the right "look & feel" is much easier when using a tech stack that was purposely created for exactly that mater - instead of hacking something into existence by misusing some technology that was created in the first place to serve completely different needs. Because of this fact people mostly stopped trying to build "HTML apps" on mobile.

The remaining question is why this wisdom isn't taken to its last consequence. Which is, of course, that it also applies exactly the same to desktop applications!

That's actually the last step on our journey before going full circle. As most other comments point out we're straight on the way to "the past", "what's old is new again". What I'm pointing out is that what we're seeing here is just an intermediate step before the full realization of that fact.