"Web app" is usually a misnomer. The world-wide web is the linked universe of addressable documents (resources). An app which is not just some behavior added to that core architecture is not capable of becoming a part of the web. It's a ghetto of single-purpose data, exactly like the client/server apps from the 1980s, only this time with a deployment model that gets it past gatekeepers in IT. It shouldn't be called a "web app" simply because its installer is delivered via HTTP, and people working on such projects ought to be aware that the network they're building is competing with the web for content while being far more hostile to hacking and mashups.
>is not capable of becoming a part of the web. It's a ghetto of single-purpose data
Sorry, but with the exception of screen-scrapping, 99.9% of the web IS single-purpose data.
Some people imagine a magical unicorn world where webpages inter-operate etc, but that never was the case. And I don't want my Gmail data messing with my Adobe Kuler data, my Amazon data, or my eBay data anyway.
For inter-operation, we have RSS, REST, AJAX, JSON and co. Web pages themselves, as served to the end user, are not were it should be expected to be (and never was there in the first place).
I think the "web" in "web app" is for web browser app, not world wide web app. Whether it should or shouldn't be called differently is by now besides the point. It's certainly not the first concept to be allegedly ill named and it won't be the last. The most important thing is to understand the nuances when creating resources to be consumed or produced over http.
> people working on such projects ought to be aware that the network they're building is competing with the web for content while being far more hostile to hacking and mashups.
On the contrary, case in point APIs: they're often distributed using formats such as JSON or XML, which weren't designed to be particularly web friendly the way HTML is. They're still much more suitable to hacking and mashups, because they go beyond the conceptual limitations of the web to fully embrace the potential of HTTP.
The only thing required for any app, even js intensive ones, to be part of the web is to provide some urls that resolve to web friendly versions of their resources and that really isn't that complicated.
