Why I love the web so much

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Problem description

What makes the web so appealing

There's something magical about the web. Unlike many technologies locked behind licenses or walled gardens, the web is open by design. Anyone with a browser and a bit of curiosity can view source, inspect, learn, and build. That kind of openness has always felt revolutionary to me. It's democratic. It's empowering. It's beautifully chaotic. You write a line of HTML or JavaScript, refresh the browser, and boom - it's alive. That instant feedback loop is addictive. And the best part? What you build can be accessed by anyone, anywhere. With a simple link, you can reach someone across the world in seconds. That's not just powerful, it's poetic. The web powers almost everything - communication, education, commerce, creativity. From social networks to medical portals, from e-learning to digital art galleries, the web is woven into the fabric of our daily existence. Being part of shaping that fabric feels like a responsibility and a privilege.

The advantages of the web over other technologies

Here is the list of things that I think has been responsible for the web's triumph:

  1. It's cross-platform and standardized. This is the obvious plus of the web. You write your code and you can expect to run it on every browser as you intended. There are few technologies that run so smoothly across different devices, operating systems and browsers. Of course, it's not 100% ideal, but you could hardly name any other technology that would beat the web in smoothness of supporting many platforms.
  2. Backward compatibility. Backward compatibility is a gem in the today's world, it's not as common as you think. Many technologies are actually breaking things left and right, this, unfortunately, means that you have to constantly test and update your application code, which is sometimes quite costly, frustrating and painful. With the web you just write and forget. It's very rare that the web breaks things. This is usually because of some security issue or severe degradation of user experience caused by misuse or abuse of some feature.
  3. You don't necessarily need complicated build tools. You can just write something in plain JS, HTML or CSS file, refresh the browser and immediately see the result.
  4. It's very versatile. The web is almost used everywhere, and it can be used even for desktop and mobile applications.
  5. It's constantly evolving. The web is an additive platform, with new features being introduced into HTML, CSS, and JS all the time, without breaking backward compatibility. In recent years, we have also had WebAssembly, which allows us to write high-performance web applications.
  6. It's easy to learn and has low entry threshold. Because it doesn't necessarily need complicated build tools, this makes learning web programming very easy and can be earned relatively quickly.

The limitations of the web

That being said, the web has some limitations. Here are the major ones:

  1. Limited system access. Compared to native apps, web apps can't easily access:
    • File systems (except via limited APIs like File System Access).
    • Bluetooth, USB, or other hardware (some support via Web Bluetooth/WebUSB, but very limited).
    • Background tasks and notifications (still restricted and platform-dependent).
  2. Performance bottlenecks. The web might be not as performant as native apps, especially when a complicated UI is based on the HTML DOM and CSS. Also, JS is dynamically typed which adds overhead. This is partially fixed by WebAssembly and canvas, but even they don't work at the exact native speed.
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