Sometimes I, too, pine for the days of "hyperlinks, text and images"-only web. So I turn off Javascript.
You can too, if that's how you want to consume the web. That's the beauty of it - it allows for that by design.
What I don't like is the position you are taking that "because I only want to consume the web that way, the Web itself should be hamstrung to my limited view of how it should work." There is no good reason - when the capability exists - that the Web as a platform should be chaste with things like Offline-first and even push messages (which IMHO are a big privacy win over the current mode of getting updates about things you're interested in, because you can't ungive someone your email address but you can easily turn off notification channels.) "Because that's not the way I want to consume the web" is not a good enough reason to deny the rest of us who want to see the Web continue as a modern and relevant platform. If you feel like shouting "get off my lawn" at the kids using those things, just flip off JS.
That's true. I have started getting a militant attitude towards web apps and I really shouldn't think like that.
I use web apps every day (JIRA, CircleCI, Slack, Google Docs). And reflecting on it, Google Docs has always been pretty damn good.
But I get irked every single time I try to do something like paste an image, or drag-and-drop, or lookup in the system dictionary and it just fails or works weirdly. I let those annoyances blind me to the value that these web apps provide.
I want the web to continue as a modern and relevant platform. But I don't see the point of trying to "escape" the browser chrome, or trying to copy the look and feel of native apps. If web apps are going to be cross-platform then they should embrace not being truly integrated with any native platform.
The article we are commenting on feels focused on making web apps "more like" native apps. I do not like that direction at all. I don't need, or want, to pretend my web apps are just like native apps. Because they never will be, and putting them side-by-side on my home screen with launch images will just increase my expectations of them to behave natively, and my annoyance with them when they fail to do so.
" ...I don't see the point of trying to "escape" the browser chrome, or trying to copy the look and feel of native apps. If web apps are going to be cross-platform then they should embrace not being truly integrated with any native platform."
I kinda feel you on that one - and to be honest, I'm not sure how you would "turn that off" but if memory serves I think it only happens if you opt to "add to home screen" which Chrome only prompts for things you visit a lot.
I had an idea for a tiny app a while ago. It didn't have business potential and was certainly not something I would bother putting in the App Store (let alone trying to figure out how to make the equivalent in Java and submit to Play Store).
I could easily have made it in HTML and JS except it required access to the camera which Mobile Safari doesn't (well didn't, I think maybe it has changed now) allow. So I ended up doing nothing.
Now, that's obviously just an anecdote and the world is at worst one useless app down but I think it makes for a good example as to why arguing against these improvements is silly: it's not in order to make websites more app-like, it's to allow things that would otherwise not exist. Yes, we should all write everything natively if we could, but sometimes that will just mean that things won't be developed at all.
Look at it from the opposite perspective though: "because I only want to develop webapps, the web itself should be bloated to contain everything I need to create apps already possible elsewhere."
"Because that's not the way I want to develop" is not a good enough reason to increase complexity, security footprint, and unintended side effects.
That's cheeky. "because I only want to develop webapps, the web itself should be bloated to contain everything I need to create apps already possible elsewhere."
I think the point is rather that single-codebase "productivity apps" that satisfy basic modern experience expectations (like "I could run it offline") are not possible elsewhere - but they should be. And they would be, if some browser vendors cared about the web more than their walled garden.
Also, the thing about expanding the Open Web Platform is that the new features that are available to me don't take anything away from you if you don't want to use them. Keep making static sites if that's what suits your purpose and don't register any ServiceWorkers or any other things you consider "bloat". (As an aside - As fashionable as it has become to moan about Web "bloat" let's strive to remember that the Web standards are debated and governed by committees of consummate experts mostly in the open.) If we expand the Web platform we can both develop "the way we want" (assuming you want to keep doing things the way you have and I want to use new features).
It was a bit tongue in cheek, but I was trying to show that there's two sides to this: developers and consumers.
Developing for a single platform and being able to run everywhere is great. I'm not sure what your "not possible elsewhere" is referring to, though. Java is one example of a language that's possible to deploy pretty much everywhere. Or do you mean natively in a browser?
While it's true that as a developer I'm free to use or not use any newly-introduced features and standards, as a consumer I don't have that choice. I either continue to use the sites and services I did before they changed everything, or I have to find an alternative which may not exist. Remember all the sites that required flash to run? That's what I want to avoid with responsive web apps.
"I think the point is rather that single-codebase "productivity apps" that satisfy basic modern experience expectations (like "I could run it offline") are not possible elsewhere - but they should be."
Why?
"Also, the thing about expanding the Open Web Platform is that the new features that are available to me don't take anything away from you if you don't want to use them. "
As a user, they do. If you go whole hog on the PWA stuff, then I no longer have the regular website you used to have.
There is one good reason. The web is a large ecosystem, and we're all living in it. You have a right to express your opinion about its development, and as a responsible inhabitant of that ecosystem, you should exercise that right.
Or, in other words, since we live in it, if the web turns into shit (even more than it already has), we'll have to live in that shit.
I said they couldn't express their opinion? No - I even validated it by saying "sometimes I feel like that, too" and prescribed a simple remedy that would cure the problem: turn off JS.
My opinion, since we're expressing them as responsible inhabitants of the Web, is that bringing the web to feature parity with mobile apps - in a responsible and well-governed way as I believe the standards committees who worked on the ServiceWorker spec have done - does more to keep it relevant and provide good User Experiences than forcing devs to try to match user expectations without the facilities.
Since we're expressing opinions, here's another one: Apple is purposefully dragging their feet by not implementing these things fully on Safari because they want to protect their precious walled garden as long as they can to the detriment of everyone else using the web.
Back to the original point I made - if you are concerned about the things being bolted on to the web "turning it to shit" you can turn them off. Maybe the UA vendors should make that easier to do, or easier to do selectively? That's an opinion you could express to them.
You can too, if that's how you want to consume the web. That's the beauty of it - it allows for that by design.
What I don't like is the position you are taking that "because I only want to consume the web that way, the Web itself should be hamstrung to my limited view of how it should work." There is no good reason - when the capability exists - that the Web as a platform should be chaste with things like Offline-first and even push messages (which IMHO are a big privacy win over the current mode of getting updates about things you're interested in, because you can't ungive someone your email address but you can easily turn off notification channels.) "Because that's not the way I want to consume the web" is not a good enough reason to deny the rest of us who want to see the Web continue as a modern and relevant platform. If you feel like shouting "get off my lawn" at the kids using those things, just flip off JS.