I don't think SPA's will be "the death of the web" exactly, but there is a big problem with this muddling of concerns... browsers get more and more confused with each passing year - is it for browsing hypermedia content, or is it a poor man's X server? Is the browser good at navigating, following links and rendering HTML, or is it good at becoming an application delivery platform? Or is it both? Why should it be both? Separation of concerns anybody?
Having content and apps on the web makes perfect sense to me, but I can't help but think we need to do something different in terms of delivering apps over the web. The problem is, the browser itself is the only "runtime" that's guaranteed to be available in all browsers on all platforms. Something like Java had tons of promise at one time for handling the "app" side, but Sun screwed the pooch by not shipping a JVM with reasonable startup times until years too late, and missing the boat on security. Now Java has a such a bad rep as a consumer-facing tech, that it would be just-short-of-impossible to revive it, even though it's probably still the best solution for "apps over the web" in many ways.
Maybe Google's NaCl / PNaCl will eventually help, but I'm not holding my breath.
Having content and apps on the web makes perfect sense to me, but I can't help but think we need to do something different in terms of delivering apps over the web. The problem is, the browser itself is the only "runtime" that's guaranteed to be available in all browsers on all platforms. Something like Java had tons of promise at one time for handling the "app" side, but Sun screwed the pooch by not shipping a JVM with reasonable startup times until years too late, and missing the boat on security. Now Java has a such a bad rep as a consumer-facing tech, that it would be just-short-of-impossible to revive it, even though it's probably still the best solution for "apps over the web" in many ways.
Maybe Google's NaCl / PNaCl will eventually help, but I'm not holding my breath.