| > On the other hand, if you are building Google Maps, then you should build a web application. Google Maps doesn't work when you disable Javascript. The "web application" label you use here means what? That it's okay to ignore web development best practices like progressive enhancement, because "web application"? That Google Maps ignored progressive enhancement is not a good reason for labelling it as a web application. Is Fix My Street (http://fixmystreet.com/) a web application? It uses a Google Maps type interface so you can report broken street lights, fly tipping: https://www.mysociety.org/2011/07/08/technical-fixmystreet-m... > it's an application built completely with Javascript, with no backend support (except for the api that it communicates with). It's a circuitous definition. Surely an API requires a backend? And surely that API predominantly uses HTTP? There isn't much difference between returning structured data, and returning an HTML view of structured data. That's just a twiddling of views from a controller (assuming a well-structured codebase). Both deal with an HTTP request and emit an HTTP response, one just does an extra step of rendering HTML. |