I think HTML/JS/CSS have become too powerful which is a good thing, at least on desktops. But when we bring that power onto more specialized devices such as our smartphones it works as weakness instead of strength. For example, people may love super rich interactive websites on desktop but it becomes pretty much useless on our phones, which have small screen. But browsers still need to ship with these features because that's what they're supposed to do--follow the web standards.
I am actually working on a blog post to talk about this in more detail, probably will publish in next couple of days. Please follow me on www.twitter.com/gliechtenstein if you are interested.
As for how this was conceived, I've been working on quite a few apps last couple of years, some I released some I didn't. One of the apps I'm working on is http://www.textethan.com and I got frustrated how I have to rebuild everything whenever I had something to change, so I built everything into a markup. Then when I looked at the end result I saw something that can be potentially very powerful so I decided to extract it out into its own app. Hope this answers the question :)
I understand your complaint but I disagree with your solution. As much as I hate working in html and js I don't think fragmenting the web like is the right solution. My ideals are much more aligned with something like Google's Accelerate Mobile Pages.
I'd be a lot more interested in a project that uses AMP html to build a native app over a custom json spec.
I think HTML/JS/CSS have become too powerful which is a good thing, at least on desktops. But when we bring that power onto more specialized devices such as our smartphones it works as weakness instead of strength. For example, people may love super rich interactive websites on desktop but it becomes pretty much useless on our phones, which have small screen. But browsers still need to ship with these features because that's what they're supposed to do--follow the web standards.
I am actually working on a blog post to talk about this in more detail, probably will publish in next couple of days. Please follow me on www.twitter.com/gliechtenstein if you are interested.
As for how this was conceived, I've been working on quite a few apps last couple of years, some I released some I didn't. One of the apps I'm working on is http://www.textethan.com and I got frustrated how I have to rebuild everything whenever I had something to change, so I built everything into a markup. Then when I looked at the end result I saw something that can be potentially very powerful so I decided to extract it out into its own app. Hope this answers the question :)