[rakoo]

I used to think like you, but I've since understood since that this is the wrong battle. You have 2 things that are more and more diverging yet use the same platform for distribution:

- websites as-you-know-them, which goal is to provide _information_

- webapps, which goal is to provide _services_

Your point of view is completely valid for the first kind: when you want the information, you don't want the frills that go around it. You want clear pointers to it in the form of clean URLs. You want it to be accessible on your smartphone that doesn't run javascript because it's heavy and has wildly different inputs.

But the second kind is completely different. When you (as in the general you) are using GMail, you actually want to use an application to manage your mail, possibly send and receive them. Whether it's in your chrome browser or native in your OS matters only as far as how easy it is to install, and on that point the web has won. But it's just a happy accident of how things have evolved.

You are not against javascript per se, you are against web apps in general. Which is totally understandable, because there are better ways to provide services on a computer than using a shiny HTML+CSS+Javascript interpreter that fetches programs on-the-fly and can't even do half of what a real OS can do.

[zachrose]

Similarly, I find myself wandering lost and confused in the valley between "app" and "document". I've been doing front-end "app" stuff a few years now, mostly because I wanted to write JS and thought that servers were scary and complex. But now that I've mostly gotten over that, I look at requirements and user stories and ask: could this just be done with HTML forms? (Sure, so maybe we want some animation and fine-grained interactivity, but most of the time these could just be frosting on the HTTP cake.)

I guess some things are really "documents" (Wikipedia articles) and some things are really "apps" (HTML5 games), but it seems like there's a huge swath of uncritical groupthink that's saying you're web thing needs to be an "app" because iPhone.