> Technically I hate the glued together, shit-stack that is the organically evolved web. One part of me thinks we have devolved from the Big Iron/VMS days. I'v

> Technically I hate the glued together, shit-stack that is the organically evolved web. One part of me thinks we have devolved from the Big Iron/VMS days. I've seen many people express their dislike for the status quo, however I haven't seen any real arguments for how things could be better. In terms of UI at least I've worked with Delphi, I've worked with Visual Basic, I've worked with Java's Swing and with WxWidgets and with Android - all of the available UI toolkits, except HTML, make it easy to build stuff with standard widgets. However, if you diverge from that path, pain ensues and I haven't encountered something more dynamic or malleable to experimentation than working with HTML/CSS. There's also nothing stopping you from implementing frameworks of standard widgets on top of the browser's DOM and Javascript. And btw, even Android or iOS developers that are quite happy with their native platform, are sometimes embedding WebViews in their app for cases in which they've got something complicated to do. In terms of Javascript, there are already compilers and frameworks that use Javascript as a target, with things like Google's GWT giving you everything a Java developer dreams about (code reuse, some static type safety, etc...), yet Javascript is still more popular by an order of magnitude than all alternatives combined. And if you haven't seen the Unreal Engine demonstrating asm.js in Firefox, you should. In terms of security, the biggest attack vectors on the web right now are old browser versions and various browser plugins that are still around, like Java (most PCs have a version of the Java plugin installed with known vulnerabilities) or Adobe Reader or other crappy plugins with a broken update cycle. With Chrome and Firefox auto-updated regularly, Javascript is actually quite secure and there's nothing in it that prevents you from sandboxing its execution. Many people complain about the state of the web, however given the constraints that the web faces (open standards, multi-platform in every sense, multiple independent implementations from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla, Opera, etc...) I have a hard time believing on how things could be better. In fact, given the history of the web, especially given Microsoft that has held the web back for a couple of years simply because they could, the web turned out to be awesome.