>And what about 'dart'? I see a growing user base. And of course JS is changing in dramatic ways. And then there are all the wordpress sites that provide the templates that convert to JS.

I don't really see that going anywhere. It seems this is just google's playground for the most part.

>
>Much of what you say is good advise - but it does sounds like a man that's built a hammer and the world now looks like a nail. You made the change to the web so many years ago - I bet that it must seem very strange to you that all have not followed your journey. I'm not really sure where the web is heading with all the security issues, constant changes in tech but the customers are not happpy with the changes.

Well I could say the same for all those that think that desktop or native mobile is the way to go :-)

I used to actually be a big proponent of building desktop apps that use services from the Web to pull their data, rather than local data. However, recently with the advent of decent frameworks in JavaScript that allow you build abstractions and use proper code separation more easily, I think we can build effective front ends in the Web that are just as nice as native UI. In fact in a lot of ways I think it's much easier to build nice looking UIs using HTML/CSS. Heck there are now many desktop frameworks that use browser containers to essentially let you wrap a Web UI into desktop apps using the PhoneGap/Cordova model. (Atom UI, Chrome Apps are a couple of examples).

It's not like a don't understand the limitations and tribulations of using JavaScript and it's funky language heuristics, or the difficulty in building Forms based UIs with HTML/CSS, but I've come to realize that this is simply not going to change anytime soon. This is the most ubiquous platform and the Web is the best way to deliver applications.

I would love to see something new come along that replaces at least the nasty JavaScript stack. I guess for now we need to settle with the welcome improvements in ES 6 and 7 which are a big step in the right direction. As I said at the start of this discussion I think we are in the midst of a huge changeover in client side technologies and I think in a year from now we're going to be looking at a very different landscape of frameworks and tools that take advantage of all of this new stuff in a much more streamlined development environment scenario.

Well.. one can hope :-)

+++ Rick ---


>Johnf