> I'm against initiatives that resist technological progress

I dispute the notion that the evolution of the web is at all progress. It has nice things, but so far the main effects are ever increasing bloat and centralisation. There are simpler ways to do this stuff, we're just too caught up in path dependence to see or invent possible alternatives.

> we should be working on efforts to increase the abilities of independent contributors

Unless you mean to make them less independent (say by providing common libraries and rendering engines), then the only way forward is to increase everyone's abilities. This is already an ongoing effort, just see how many programming languages and methodologies are popping up every year.

> the web as a platform today is unfathomably better today than it was in the 90s

The web wasn't even a platform the 90's, of course it's a better platform now. However, it only became a platform by accident. This reminds me of C++'s accidentally Turing complete templates, which later spawned template meta-programming madness.

If a platform was design from the ground up as a platform, it would all be much simpler, perhaps even more capable. But no, we had to piggy back on whatever the market favoured at the time.

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Here's what I think: a web-ish platform written today wouln't need more than 0.1% of Firefox's 35 million lines of code, or about 30 thousand lines. Or maybe 10 times that amount, to account for optimisation and long tail functionalities —that's still under 1%.

This even has been done. The STEPS projects at http://vpri.org is only 20K lines, including the compiler collection and editing tools. It even runs at acceptable speeds on a laptop.

That would be progress. That would spur the independence of contributors. Too bad the market just isn't ready for this. It probably never will be.

Progress is very subjective. Yes, its true that some "good" things have "bad" consequences. An example is that an average website in 2017 on an average computer + internet connection from 2007 is dog slow. But that doesn't mean these "good" things are not progressive. Rather, I'd describe it as 2 steps forward, 1 step backward. Take for example the smartphone/touchscreen phenomenon. It has its negative consequences. People are able to record anything (sound/video). They're using these things during traffic. But that doesn't mean there's no positive consequences. The end result is a nuanced list of + and - effects and there's no need to discount all the + or all the - with an extreme standpoint.

Let's weight the good and bad. First, what is possible today that wasn't then? I see only multimedia and games. Text forums like this one were totally possible in the 90's. They just weren't as pretty.

Then let's examine why stuff is so bloated now: is it because we have more features? For the most part we don't. It's just abstractions piled on top of each other, images, and ads.

I'm not even sure the costs are even related to the benefits.

I think you're focusing on the costs and neglecting many of the benefits. For example, just think about how much easier it is to learn to code nowadays, thanks to the proliferation of helpful websites that take a variety of approaches to teaching, many of which were enabled by web technologies. GitHub, JavaScript 30, Khan Academy, RunKit, Flexbox Defense, Codecademy, just to name a few. And think about how many more of these sites exist today than would have in the past, because more people are building them, they're much easier to build (again, thanks to new web technologies).

And this is just learning to code.

> I think you're focusing on the costs and neglecting many of the benefits.

Which of those costs actually enabled the benefits? Very few, I'd wager. Much of those were avoidable. Or would have been if the market wasn't so short sighted.

> GitHub, JavaScript 30, Khan Academy, RunKit, Flexbox Defense, Codecademy

I reckon some of this does require a scripting engine somewhere. But not all of it. I still believe your examples are possible without JavaScript (even without CSS). A REPL wouldn't need it, if you have the server do the computation (within limits to prevents DOS attacks). It just wouldn't be as pretty.

But that would be unwise. Many of those really are applications, and they deserve a proper application platform. Which the web isn't, despite herculean efforts to the contrary.

A proper application platform needs to give access to simple, relatively low level constructs. Something like web assembly, a raster viewport, input, and sound. Meaning, a virtual machine. Browsers are becoming such anyway. Also, no text handling, no style sheet, no programming language. Let the users implement a web browser on top of the application platform if they really want to.

Actually, I do hope we eventually turn this madness on its head, and implement browsers on top of web assembly engines. This would drastically reduce the effective attack surface (good for security), and do wonders for portability. Wouldn't solve the independence problem, though.

I'm sorry, but who says the web platforms of today are "progress?" it's the same re-heated cross-platform "write-once-run-anywhere" pies-in-the-sky as 20-30 years ago. It's just these days it's wearing half-shaved heads and horn rimmed glasses, skinny pants and plaid shirts instead of pony tails and threadbare t-shirts and jeans/shorts with sandals or sneakers.

I had bosses argue pretty much exactly this when I resisted proposals to remake entire websites in Flash... "It's _obviously_ the future!" they said...