Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
Reading through all these comments, I feel there's one salient question left unanswered: What's the alternative, then, under such a divisive landscape of various OS and standards? Surely it's infeasible for the vast majority to develop native applications for each and every platform out there, for everything we want to do? The current web application solutions are the best people have come up with. If they're indeed so rubbish and we're in a "dark age", then why hasn't an alternative triumphed? It's not like companies with money and might haven't tried over all these decades, they just simply didn't succeed. There is a reason why web application is being so widely adopted, and attributing all to "errors and flukes" makes no sense.<p>Either you unite all the platforms to make them one, which I'd rather not for diversity's sake, or you accept the fact that there has to be something out there that supports all of them, which isn't going to be an easy feat no matter what.<p>By the way, I surely also hate CSS, and JS to an extent, but my experience programming UI in other platforms haven't been exactly pain-free either. The hate might have been a bit overblown. The nature of computer programming in its current form just simply fits badly with UI design. That's the fact.