This whole conversation baffles me. The web is a sloppily-evolved designed-by-committee sofa-bed, nobody will ever feel completely happy with it, and it shouldn

This whole conversation baffles me. The web is a sloppily-evolved designed-by-committee sofa-bed, nobody will ever feel completely happy with it, and it shouldn't be any other way. Most of the time I work on "web applications", where the difficult part is managing the necessary complexity of the domain model and the user interfaces. JS and framework-happy architecture isn't perfect (not even close), but adding constraints like "the application must weigh less than a megabyte" or "the application must provide basic functions (?!) without JavaScript" turns what can be a fairly serious project into a clown-car pileup. There's a faction of web people who want web applications to compete feature-for-feature with native apps. I'm closer to that camp for historical reasons, but I also understand that compromise on application features is completely worth it if the benefit is an (even partially) "open" platform for applications to build on. But then there's this other faction of HTML purists who see the "true" web as necessarily document-based, declared with markup, typeset with CSS, and compatible with absolutely every computer system of the past 30 years. This makes perfect sense if you work for a magazine and see the web as a platform for open (and often static) content, and I'm sure some of them do understand the difficulty and the value of compromise, but I never hear that. So now it's 2018, the "beat native apps" camp and the "documents for all" camp talk past each other through the years and nothing really changes. Maybe some people are in both camps and suffering from cognitive dissonance, who knows. But there are good reasons why web applications don't do what Photoshop does, and good reasons why Photoshop doesn't even try to provide copy-and-pasteable URLs for every unique application state. There are good reasons why "serious" declarative application frameworks (like XAML) are a terrifying mess, and good reasons why building a CMS from scratch in C++ would be insane.