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I consider ubiquity and instant-ness (i.e., accessibility) to be quite important aspects in which the Web platform is superior to native platforms. I don't know what you mean by "truly excellent software", but I'd rather make imperfect, useful software than perfect software no one uses, wouldn't you? And it is certainly possible, and nowadays routine, to create simple, elegant, well-architected, maintainable, efficient, performant, small-footprint Web applications. Yes, the Web platform has all kinds of warts and scars. In and of itself, all else being equal, they are of course strictly a bad thing. But the principle of openness and cross- and backwards compatibility--the principle that technical concerns must be balanced against community concerns--that is their root cause, I believe to be superior to any of the alternatives we've seen, which have given rise to proprietary standards, walled gardens, dependency and upgrade hell. I agree that "throwing" more code at problems rarely results in elegant and efficient solutions, but disregarding existing community concerns, like legacy software or standards, rarely results in successful solutions. |