The web sucks if you have a slow connection
&gt; Why shouldn’t the web work with dialup or a dialup-like connection?<p>Because we have the capability to work beyond that capacity now in most cases. That&#x27;s like asking &quot;why shouldn&#x27;t we allow horses on our highways?&quot;<p>&gt; Pretty much everything I consume online is plain text, even if it happens to be styled with images and fancy javascript.<p>No doubt, pretty much everyone who works on web apps for long enough understands that it&#x27;s total madness. The cost however, in supporting people so far behind as to only be able to serve them text is quite frankly unmanageable. The web has grown <i>dramatically</i> over the past 20 years both in terms of physical scale and supported media types.<p>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&#x27;s a tool that allows me to access the interfaces I use in my daily life. I think there&#x27;s a ton of value in this, perhaps more than as a platform for simple reading news and blogs.<p>I look forward to WebAssembly and other advancements that allow us to treat the web as we once treated desktop environments, at the expense of human readability. It doesn&#x27;t mean we need to abandon older + simpler protocols, because they too serve a purpose. But to stop technological advancement in order to appease the lowest common denominator seems silly to me.