[marrs]

No. Any thick client architecture has to deal with this problem. The current resource-oriented models (by which I mean they're focused on serving http resources) are severely limiting those of us who want to develop a web application.

Some people are side-stepping the issue by saying that the whole presentation layer must be moved to the front-end, but that approach is really incompatible with the web.

If anything, the current state of the front-end is thanks to server-side developers who want to bring their world view to the browser. (Think: MVC -> Backbone / Ruby -> Coffeescript -- apologies to the authors of those tools)