I have complicated feelings about the web. Do I think it's perfect? No, absolutely not. Do I think it could've gone differently, better, and end up with the same *positive* traits? I'm not so sure.

There's a lot of takes like "apps don't belong on the web" and "separation of concerns is bullshit" or conversely "separation of concerns is holy", but I think all of these are grossly oversimplified, and it is really a lot more complicated.

In practice, the web is essentially the only application development target that truly works cross-platform, almost regardless of what you use - and it didn't even try to be that originally! It just kind of grew that way.

Because as it turns out, there are very good practical reasons why people like putting apps on the web - the ability to seamlessly link between content-in-apps and content-on-sites being a good (but rarely mentioned) example.

Likewise, separation of concerns makes a lot of sense as a concept. The exact boundaries between the concerns might not be the ideal ones, but... are there better ones? And can those better ones universally stand the test of time better than the current ones?

Because it's easy to find a sensible separation of concerns for a particular application, but finding a sensible separation of concerns *for every project by anyone forever* is a whole lot more difficult! It's not without reason that many UI toolkits are adopting design choices from web-land.

Or consider HTML. Is it a bit annoying to work with? Sure. Is it optimal for sending over a network? Absolutely not.

But... would we ever have arrived at a 'participatory web' to begin with if thousands of teens weren't able to use their browser to look at and tinker with the completely human-readable source code of existing websites?

Was there ever a way we could have gotten to where we are today, other than through flawed-but-easily-accessible technology?

These are just some of the reasons that I think the many widespread "web is horrible" and "web is amazing" takes do a disservice to what the web has become, and the people involved in making it so.

Yes, I think there's plenty to criticize. But I don't think it's possible to capture all of this into a binary judgment of quality, and people trying to do so anyway makes it very difficult to discuss the topic with any nuance.