Without taking progressive enhancement into consideration, let's look at the facts. From the article: Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even App

Without taking progressive enhancement into consideration, let's look at the facts. From the article: Google. Craigslist. YouTube. Facebook. Twitter. Even Apple's company site. What do they all have in common? Text and the occasional image. There's no animation, video, color backgrounds, textures, window decorations, animated drop-down menus, ambient sound, background music, gimmicks, gizmos or gew-gaws. Let's see: Google: Currently has a game on the homepage. Certainly could be considered a `gimmick, gizmo, or gew-gaw.` YouTube: Obviously has video, some fancy modals can be found by hovering over certain things, I'm sure there's a ton that I am missing. Facebook: The site is built on databases, JavaScript, and other technologies the author apparently considers `slow, buggy nonsense`. Where do you think all those user images are stored? Chat certainly requires either AJAX or Websockets (I have not checked). Twitter: OK, we are closer to `text and images`. Still, these guys released Bootstrap http://getbootstrap.com/ http://getbootstrap.com/ which changed the web -- obviously huge proponents of CSS. I think the understanding today is -- even if you are not a designer/front-end developer, it is unacceptable to deliver work without minimal styling, since you can throw Bootstrap on something with little effort. Do you prefer plain browser styled inputs to that? Twitter also has a ton of infrastructure underneath that 'simple' 140-character messaging 'social network'. Apple: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ Enough said. -- And finally, the comment `Here's a pro tip from a seasoned veteran of web development: if you want to do something really remarkable on a computer, you don't write it in HTML. You write it in C.`. I'm confused whether you mean "do something remarkable on a computer" (as written) or "do something remarkable on the web". Your essay appears to be a rant on why, you think, the web sucks. I get it, most of the technologies we use are somehow dependent on C (CPython, most databases, OS). So, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. Those libraries written in C enable us. What does that have to do with the average web developer doing something remarkable? Most of us will never have to deal with the scaling problems of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Python is fast enough for me. Ruby is fast enough for most Rails users. If I ever need more performance, perhaps I will look into Go. The key point is `if`. I'm not going to start a new web project in `C`, when modern languages and frameworks ease the level of effort to write the code, and contain features I would otherwise have to re-implement. You sure you aren't trollin`?