> How many websites have user-definable menu shortcuts, unlimited undo, instant user-feedback for every operation, tooltips that can be switched on or off, full

> How many websites have user-definable menu shortcuts, unlimited undo, instant user-feedback for every operation, tooltips that can be switched on or off, full internal drag & drop and OS-level drag and drop of files, standard user interface elements that work how the user expects them to work, a context-sensitive online help system, reconfigurable toolbars with user-definable icon sets, multiple open documents at once, movable and reconfigurable tool windows, manye internationalizations, and so on? The reason you got all that stuff with desktop applications is that the designers of the platforms those applications ran on (Microsoft and Apple, mostly) included them in the platform by default. As long as you colored within the lines of the platform, your application would pick up all those nice features without you having to do any work to add them. You got them all "for free." You could of course build a desktop application that didn't get those features by coloring outside the lines -- building your own GUI widget set rather than using the one the platform provided, for instance. But, and this is the important bit, that meant doing extra work, and most programmers (like most people) are lazy. They don't want to do extra work unless they really have to. So most developers stayed within the lines, and the platform rewarded them for doing so by giving them all these nice accessibility and usability benefits. The Lazy Way and the Right Way were deliberately aligned, and everybody benefited. This is what the Web platform is missing: nobody has done the extra work to force the Lazy Way and the Right Way into alignment. The set of UI primitives the Web platform offers a developer is very small, and hasn't really changed since the late '90s. So the inevitable result is that everyone ends up building their own custom versions of everything -- and since people are lazy, those custom versions end up half-baked. They get just enough polish to address the most common cases, but things like accessibility and usability aren't deemed worth the extra effort they'd require to implement. So we get applications that feel broken compared to desktop apps. What we need is a richer set of common primitives that are attractive enough to convince people to use them instead of rolling their own, and that also provide all those nice features you mentioned by default. We'll never get an accessible Web app ecosystem if we expect every developer to build accessibility for themselves. It only works if they get that stuff for free.