> Somewhere around the late 90s or early 00s we made the decision to jump ship from desktop apps and start writing the lion’s share of new software for the web.

> Somewhere around the late 90s or early 00s we made the decision to jump ship from desktop apps and start writing the lion’s share of new software for the web. I would argue that this started much earlier and was because of the problems with distributing, installing, and updating desktop apps. We even had names like "fat client" (it was meant to be pejorative) to refer to traditional desktop apps and "client-less" (it was meant to sound magical) to refer to web apps. There wasn't a problem with desktop development frameworks. There was only one, Windows, and those people who used it enjoyed it. > HTML and CSS gave developers total visual control over what their interfaces looked like, allowing them to brand them and build experiences that were pixel-perfect according to their own ends. This seemed like a big improvement over more limiting desktop development, This isn't how I remember it. Developers didn't want total control, but publishers did. Browsers let you select background colors, font colors, sizes, and types. A website was never meant to render exactly the same. But then the publishers entered the picture and they expected a website to behave like a magazine. That's why we had whole websites that were made up of images only. CSS was invented to put a stop to this madness. However, it institutionalized the publishers mindset that websites should render the same everywhere. Overall a lot of this article can be summed up as "just because you can, doesn't mean you should." As an industry, we do self-restraint very poorly.