One should consider the possibility that the entire web development industry is a giant busy-work factory making half-baked kluges to a fundamental problem that will never be papered over: http is a stateless protocol for sending hypertext. markup. meta-data and context for resources in a folder somewhere. It's a file-system thing.
A web browser is a declarative-markup-tree rendering-engine with scriptable nodes, and the language chosen for scripting is an accident of history.
Using http and web browsers in ways they never were intended to be used is possible, albeit painful.
Now that we have virtual DOM's and isomorphic platforms like clojure/clojurescript and we compile to JS, now that we have JS on the server, now that we have our head so thoroughly up our ass that we forgot the point, now we can consider the circle of ridiculous nonsense complete...
The world wide web took off, and we have to live with it's technical debt, or...
The solution is simple, bold, and risky:
1) pick a port. (Nowadays that's even a joke. we tunnel everything over port 80.)
2) pick a protocol with some future (hey let's just tack websockets on as an upgrade, gradually get browser support, etc)
3) keep moving...
I am not ultra impressed with the web of 2016...
The web of 1996 was way cooler.
I want a VRML3 rendering engine for a browser.
Oh, don't even get me started with build tools.
Nowadays we have build tools to build build tools.
I'm sorry, but when FRONT-END DEV considers build tools standard we are LOST lost lost...
How many JS libraries and CSS scripts do we really need to embed in a page? How many of those functions or classes are even being used in that page?
Why do I have to scroll to view source on a page with mostly text and a few colored boxes?
In a nutshell, I think, with some risk, that some innovators could literally pick a port, pick a protocol, and build a different kind of browser... once there is some content for that platform it's a matter of time before early adopters download one of these new class of browsers and so forth... it's how it happened the first time, and it's how pretty much everything happened... even games (second life) etc.
and meanwhile, the web can go back to being a directory preview/ resource hyperlink web...
The world wide web took off, and we have to live with it's technical debt, or...
The solution is simple, bold, and risky: 1) pick a port. (Nowadays that's even a joke. we tunnel everything over port 80.) 2) pick a protocol with some future (hey let's just tack websockets on as an upgrade, gradually get browser support, etc) 3) keep moving...
I am not ultra impressed with the web of 2016... The web of 1996 was way cooler. I want a VRML3 rendering engine for a browser.