No, no it's not, it's really not. You're already writing your SPAs with a REST backend, right? Well, guess what: static HTML & REST go together like burgers & beer! All you need to do is add an HTML content renderer to your REST backend, and you have _something_ someone can use to interact with.

> The web is becoming a platform delivery service for complex applications. Some people like to think of the web as just hyper text, and everything on it should be human parse-able. For me, as someone who has come late to the game, it has never seemed that way. The web is where I go to do things: work, learn, consume, watch, play. It's a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life.

True fact: learning, consuming & watching are all well-supported by static HTML.

> But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.

Part of the problem is that we're not advancing technologically: we're getting bogged down in the La Brean morass which is modern web development. HTML is a terrible but acceptable markup language; CSS is an ugly but somewhat acceptable styling language; the DOM is as hideous as a Gorgon; JavaScript is approximately the worst language ever; the combination of all the above is grotesque, and an ongoing indictment of our entire industry.

A cross-platform application-distribution standard sounds pretty awesome, but that's not what web pages are supposed to be, and it's not what web browsers should deliver. The web is a web of hyperlinked documents. It's right there in its name. And anyone who demands that his readers enable a somewhat cross-platform, highly insecure, privacy-devouring application-distribution tool in order to read his text is welcome to take a long walk off of a short pier.