[nl]

I completely disagree.

I've been using the web since 1994, and it's always distributed applications. I mean what were WAIS and Veronica except attempts to build applications - and they were (vastly inferior) predecessors to the web.

The web is the most ugly, horrible, messy, fantastic and beautiful Commons in human history and I love it.

Yes, people will block it and Balkenize it and make it ugly and make terrible apps that run horribly.

But it is better than anything else we've built, so there is that.

[Fnoord]

I think you're both right. What I dislike about it, is how we went from walled gardens to ads, tracking, and guilt tripping adblock users (while IMO whatever you see or don't want to see is up to the client). It is a huge cat and mouse game.

(That guilt tripping is what worries me in relation to WebUSB and webserial.)

In a TUI, it is still completely unacceptable that the client would spam the user with ads. And if it would, due to FOSS nature it is easy to circumvent.

If web devs are clever they produce an API instead of pure HTML + JS + the whole bloated crap around them. It'd save them costs, and heavy API users could subscribe.