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I don't mind the technical discussion at all, it's a fun write-up, but if you "look at the the ecosystem of web applications and measure by difficulty" and find the most difficult possible app you can, and using that to shape your vision of how to build web apps, lionize what a web app is, I think one is very very liable to end up with a completely non-web monster that ignores many of the strongest strengths of application & site design that are possible. Google Docs is themselves moving to canvas based rendering, which might as well be turning the screen into a giant VNC session into their codebases[1]. Web, dead, pushing pixels in people's faces, in. All the extensions that extend & enhance Google Docs are about to die, being replaced with a very small, much narrower API provided explicitly by google. I see statements like, > This gets me excited about whats to come, because what's at the edge of difficulty today tends to become the new normal tomorrow. And think, please, let us not be path dependent on a web-recreation of classic desktop apps. The web is more interesting, it has online content, liveliness & connectivity to it that far surpasses the other platform's norms. Let us think of how we might advance the web for good web things. There's worth & value to examining hard problems, but I am worried that this attitude has us set out to build faster horses. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27129858 |