I think the trend of "turning a primarily content-based site into a dynamic app", and indeed most of what has been referred to as "Web progress", "moving the Web forward", etc. comes from the desire of content producers to obtain and maintain more control over their content. Look at how browsers have evolved to de-emphasise features which give the user control while adding those that are author-targeted.
I don't agree with this. Browsers are more user-targeted than ever.
We're moving from browsers being viewers for simple HTML documents (which can be copied, shared, and linked via simple means)
Browsers still allow this.
to a platform for running complex applications written in JavaScript which often render data retrieved in proprietary formats from proprietary APIs.
I have rarely seen a web API that uses anything other than straightforward JSON.
The "open by default" nature of plain HTML has become the "closed by default" of the data processed by web apps
Almost always equally as open as any HTML you would previously received.
Native app platforms (e.g. mobile) are also gradually becoming more "closed by default"; I'm not sure if that's a related trend.
> I have rarely seen a web API that uses anything other than straightforward JSON.
There are differences between HTML vs. AJAX+JSON+Javascript+DOM. JSON has a lot less of a schema than HTML. You don't have to execute custom code from a remote server to render plain HTML. Client-side rendering is more complex for the client. A Javascript-based page is typically going to require more requests for remote resources than inline HTML, potentially meaning more bandwidth and caching/archiving costs. I can't quite put my finger on the implications right now, but I wanted to note that "JSON is a standard." doesn't mean much to me, since JSON is not comparable to HTML.
>> We're moving from browsers being viewers for simple HTML documents (which can be copied, shared, and linked via simple means)
> Browsers still allow this.
Yes, they allow it. But consider that user stylesheets have been dropped, hardly any improvements have been made with presenting standard html (unless you count giving in to IE and moving from less-stark black-on-grey to too stark black-on-white as an improvement).
Still no browser does a half-decent job of avoiding ragged-right text[1], give you decent margins on un-styled content, etc. There's no real reason for this. You could claim "backwards compatability" -- but if there was genuine interest, there'd be nothing stopping the introduction of a <sane-default-render-html6-whatever> content type.
It's ironic, that browsing a plain html-site in w3m in the console is a better reading experience than opening the same page in a desktop browser. So of course people need to supply a crap-load of stuff just to get decent, basic text layout, that flows well across various screen sizes. No reason a basic, unstyled html-document couldn't look much better than a TeX/LaTeX document published in the 80s, with the added bonus of re-flowing in a sane way for various window/screen sizes -- but they all look awful, too the point that plain html is actually not usable.
You need to wrap a document in js to get sensible layout, and in css to get sensible presentation. Even if the document doesn't contain any other media than text. Add an image or two, and things keep going downhill. It's absurd.
I don't agree with this. Browsers are more user-targeted than ever.
We're moving from browsers being viewers for simple HTML documents (which can be copied, shared, and linked via simple means)
Browsers still allow this.
to a platform for running complex applications written in JavaScript which often render data retrieved in proprietary formats from proprietary APIs.
I have rarely seen a web API that uses anything other than straightforward JSON.
The "open by default" nature of plain HTML has become the "closed by default" of the data processed by web apps
Almost always equally as open as any HTML you would previously received.
Native app platforms (e.g. mobile) are also gradually becoming more "closed by default"; I'm not sure if that's a related trend.
What do you mean by this?