- The author failed to draw a clear distinction between "The Web" as an application platform and "The Web" as a network of semantic information.
- Digging deeper, "The Web" the application framework is pretty flexible. There are plenty of ways to use hypermedia and HTTP, while using your own non-HTML/CSS UI tooling.
- The article strikes me as ill-researched -- the author writes "Here’s a good blog post on Flux, the latest hot web framework from Facebook". Flux is definitely not the latest from Facebook, and some of the linked articles were from 2015. For better or worse (I think better), front-end is moving really fast, and the web platform roast listicles don't age well.
- The point about "UI Complexity" is just odd. UIs should not be complex. Comparing the windows explorer to Google docs is comparing fruits to vegetables. The point "look! we still have toolbars and shades of grey" has nothing to do with the web and everything to do with UX metaphors and familiar affordances.
- "Things as basic as UI components are a disaster zone". UI "components" are not basic! What is a component? No seriously, ask a programmer content with OO languages, and then ask someone who prefers functional languages. Then ask those developers to agree on an interface.
Though I do agree with:
- Web apps are slow. Painting is really complicated.
- So many apps are written with the assumption that they're always online. The author is right that users have low expectations when it comes to good offline experiences.
- The web wasn't designed with our contemporary single-page application use case in mind.
- JS could obviously be way better.
- The need for backwards compatibility is pretty crippling.