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One problem is that the line of demarcation between "document" and "application" isn't always totally clear cut. I think most of us intuit that something like G

One problem is that the line of demarcation between "document" and "application" isn't always totally clear cut. I think most of us intuit that something like Gmail is an "application", whereas something like https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html https://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.h... is a "document". But as soon as you introduce something as trivial as user login, now you need forms, cookies, etc. And Javascript can be used to make "rich documents" (I'm thinking of things like Tangle.js based docs, for example) that blur the line between "document" and "application". For that matter, where does HN fall on the spectrum? It's not as "application'y" as some sites, but it's certainly not a static document either.

krapp 7y ago
Having seen this argument come up many times on HN, I've come to the conclusion that the line between "document" and "application" on the web is more emotional than technical. Although the definition in the article would seem to be that "documents" are static, non-interactive (excluding even forms and possibly any kind of server-side rendering), non-scriptable HTML pages which simulate paper documents as much as possible, with perhaps the sole exception of allowing hypertext, and "applications" are everything else. If so, that seems far more restrictive than even the web in its infancy, at least at the point where most people became aware of it.