I personally think ReST APIs accessed over HTTP + TCP/IP have a lot of utility but I think we can do better on the UI front. Maybe we need an alternative to the web browser that can run a different (or variety of) languages other than Javascript, with a better presentation option than the DOM.
No other successful platform provides all of these today and others that could are too small to matter.
Platforms like Android and Flutter deliver subsets of these properties but capitulate to capture by the host OS agenda, allowing their developers to be taxed through app stores and proprietary API lock-in. Most treat user mediation like a bug to be fixed.
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The DOM seems critical to the user mediation goal, and user mediation is IMO a critical differentiator with other platforms.
E.g. the web would be way less cool if I couldn't have "reader mode".
Maybe the root problems are HTML and its browsers. Or more exactly: the fact HTML is about documents. Everything done to make apps from it are hacks.
What would be really needed is an open application format standard and a protocol to share it and maybe interact with it. And open source clients able to run those applications.
- UI running in browsers?
- TCP/IP?
- HTTP(S)?
I personally think ReST APIs accessed over HTTP + TCP/IP have a lot of utility but I think we can do better on the UI front. Maybe we need an alternative to the web browser that can run a different (or variety of) languages other than Javascript, with a better presentation option than the DOM.