Then we clearly have different definition of "application". For me, an web application runs in the browser, not merely exposes an API over HTTP that can be used by HTML from a browser.

You have a very narrow definition of an application then.

Yeah, him and every other user that includes basic features like "when I select the first step in a sequence of steps, the UI immediately responds instead of waiting several hundred ms to fetch an entirely new set of markup".

Every time I use Tor, I appreciate your viewpoint. But trying to pretend that most developers are better off spending their time maintaining a separate renderer for a few edge case users is not really reflective of reality.

I didn't say JavaScript can't be used to ENHANCE an application, I'm saying it isn't necessary and apps should work without it.

Absolutely. I'm sick and tired of idiot developers fucking up the web with their bullshit "apps" which are slow, crash all the time, and break everything.

I've worked on more "web apps" than I can count and the reality is, only 2 of them were legitimate use cases for a pure JS solution. And we gain nothing from it. I've just spent all morning debugging an issue with a complicated angular directive (and not for the first time) that would have been a few lines of jquery a couple of years ago. Probably because a bored dev wanted to play with a new toy.

As you imply, we were writing sophisticated web apps long before AJAX was popularised and those apps were way more reliable and predictable than what we have now, and they worked in Lynx if you wanted.

Even in 1999, using JavaScript to make far more usable UIs was common. While I'm not a fan of these bloated apps that need a couple megs of stuff just to render some basic looking page, let's not pretend that requiring user action and a full round trip to render even the smallest change was some golden era.

>that would have been a few lines of jquery a couple of years ago

Irony?

Please elaborate.