[ndriscoll]

Back in the 90s chat was a separate program you ran, not a web page with a form. Largely this still makes sense. I don't want web pages to even theoretically be capable of getting presence information or popping up notifications just to support this single narrow ill-fitted use case. Older chat apps also knew how to use more than 1 window so you could have 2+ chats open at once, which is apparently beyond the capabilities of modern web UIs.

Many things on the web are not interactive at all (news, blogs, shopping) or have almost no interactivity (forums). These things could just be HTML with a sprinkle of JavaScript for some flair like it's 2002. Ironically Facebook falls into this category; almost nothing on their site needs to "react" to anything (except to spy on every mouse movement you make, obviously).

Something like tax forms should probably be xforms in a better universe. It's literally a form, but some fields might be calculated from other fields.

A word processor as a web page is a funny technical demo, but it's mostly an artifact of how Windows and Mac didn't have app repositories for 20 years (still basically don't? Idk). There's no way in hell that it was easier to use JavaScript and CSS to make a cross platform UI than something like Qt, especially at the time.

I get a chuckle whenever people talk about "supporting dark mode" like that's a modern feature. You used to be able to set your color palette in the OS settings, and every program had dark mode by default (this still works with native apps on KDE at least). It would be a lot less work for web developers and make for a better experience if the browser just respected that preference for default page styles, and then web pages/apps used canonical style names to access that palette, but here we are.