[rimantas]

15 years ago the thing we call "web application" hardly existed. If web page "has nothing except JavaScript" (e.g. GMail) is probably is web app and indexing it makes little sense anyway. If someone misuses JS on content site, that's another story. And your comment about innovation makes no sense at all. Capabilities of modern browsers (Canvas, geolocation, local storage, offline apps, etc.) offer more opportunities for innovation than "old web" could even imagine.

[cypherpunks]

I am aware of the current opportunities.

I think you (and most people here) underestimate what the "old web" could imagine, though. We had all sort of ideas for agents that would go out and grab and analyze data for us in all sorts of clever and interesting ways. Search engines got built, as did one or two other things, and then the web just got too complex.

Hell, even I had a simple app that went out and grabbed all my favorite comics and showed them to me, nicely formatted, and without ads.

[keks]

You mean ad filtered RSS/Atom? I assume such a program would be much faster to write these days: have a set of newsfeeds, map() them with a filter function and merge the results.

While the web gets more complex, the tools at hand get better. Much better.

[DCoder]

If web page "has nothing except JavaScript" (e.g. GMail) is probably is web app and indexing it makes little sense anyway.

What about JS frameworks like JavascriptMVC or Sammy [1]? Google even created a spec [2] for crawling such sites.

[1] http://sammyjs.org/ [2] http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started...

[prodigal_erik]

Gmail's HTML view works fine in Links. That team has been showing competence and diligence that's increasingly rare, and I wish people wouldn't tar them with the same brush as the clowns who write js-only crap.