Well, the fact that people are gradually moving towards REST APIs (sometimes even on the public facing side) at least suggest that some people clearly think tha

Well, the fact that people are gradually moving towards REST APIs (sometimes even on the public facing side) at least suggest that some people clearly think that breaking the HTTP model was a bad idea. And I'm seeing increasingly many people that get annoyed with the bloated HTML pages that don't work without huge amounts of javascript and which break normal things like history or sometimes even scrolling. Unlike the post I was replying to I'm not so much complaining about webpages that mimic (or are) standalone applications, I'm mostly complaining about webpages that have effectively built their own browser just to display some HTML documents. Sure some stuff can't be done with a pure HTML document model (at least not without some kind of black-box html element), but plenty of stuff is just displaying some representation of content and (optionally) allowing people to manipulate it which really shouldn't require anywhere near the amount of effort people sometimes throw at it.