I think it’s because, on a fundamental level, we have been trying to wedge an app platform into a document reader.
Zoom out and think about how mad this is. Like if we tried to build “Web 2.0” inside Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Apple has prescribed front-end frameworks like AppKit and UiKit and now SwiftUI, Linux had Gnome and GTK and whatever (I’m not an expert and my knowledge here is out of date)… there’s never been a Correct Way to build a web app because the browser doesn’t have an Apple Microsoft or Linux Foundation, so we’ve been winging it all along.
I’m similarly tired of framework churn, NextJS server components might be the breaking point for me. But there’s no way I’m going back from component driven architecture, and I’m not sure what a vanilla js answer to a static site builder like Next (back when it was good) or Gatsby would be like.
Absolutely. It took me a while to realize that I hated web development and why: because of all the layers of stuff you have to deal with on top of that document fetching platform. Something as simple as maintaining a login session is a complicated problem, even before you get into validating users, single sign-on, etc. You can put a lot of that out-of-sight/out-of-mind by letting a framework deal with it, but it's still there, lurking, waiting to bite you. And that's just one small aspect of building a web app.
It's too bad Java sucked so much. Maybe we could have had applets that worked like desktop apps, keeping the app-type stuff within applets and leaving the document reader alone. Probably not.
But most web apps are actually web sites and they do fit the document model. If we consider the web as a UI layer, it's capabilities are more than just sufficient. The issue is when you want to bring business logic into it, or fighting the document model to bring in your own abstractions.
I'm going to go out on a limb and also suggest that there's a lower barrier to entry with HTML. You get a lot "for free" and this means there's more to choose from.
(But yes, I think this is a good assessment, and it matches my experience.)
Zoom out and think about how mad this is. Like if we tried to build “Web 2.0” inside Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Apple has prescribed front-end frameworks like AppKit and UiKit and now SwiftUI, Linux had Gnome and GTK and whatever (I’m not an expert and my knowledge here is out of date)… there’s never been a Correct Way to build a web app because the browser doesn’t have an Apple Microsoft or Linux Foundation, so we’ve been winging it all along.
I’m similarly tired of framework churn, NextJS server components might be the breaking point for me. But there’s no way I’m going back from component driven architecture, and I’m not sure what a vanilla js answer to a static site builder like Next (back when it was good) or Gatsby would be like.