As long as enterprise continues to shift to a no-install web application based IT infrastructure, fad driven client based "web dev" will continue to increase in frequency and prominence. If (when?) people realize that the browser actually can't do everything this might change, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It's too easy to save a buck now by minimizing application development and support costs (browser-based web app vs. native) and let the poor idiot who takes over management five years from now worry about the fallout.

This is ridiculous. Building business applications as web applications have many advantages such as portability, network accessibility, speed of development, ease of development, speed. Over native apps. The sheer fact that you can hand off processing to the server and not block your entire ui makes the majority of web apps far better than the majority of poorly coded win forms garbage I've used.

Building an application by rendering static webpages is just a horrible cludge. How did we even get here? How are we still even considering that the godawful turd that is string concatenation of DOM descriptors polished by a layer of templating languages is actually a decent way of writing applications?

Do you seriously believe this?

The virtual DOM is probably the biggest elephant in the room. It begs the question: why the hell isn't the REAL DOM like that?

If you have to pose a really terrible strawman to argue for client side templates, you are basically conceding the argument. It is even worse given that moving it to the client doesn't change anything you complained about.

Haha, this got parodied by the horse. Anyway, I use angular.js. It tries to suggest a reasonable path forward for evolving the the DOM into something which is usable for applications. (resulting with web components, shadow DOM etc)

But yes I realized I'm arguing about the wrong thing - about web applications, not (most) websites. Whoops.

Internet itself was called "a fad" by some.