"I don't see what any of this has to do with the initial premise that the web provided a way of avoiding the complexities of cross-platform development."
That was not the initial premise. It was about the web supposedly removing the platform dependencies. Not the technical ones but the business ones - basically an unremovable third party between the developer and their customers. Here's an example of such an article by Tim Bray:
Quote: "You’re not a sharecropper, especially not a sharecropper, if you’re building on the Web platform. If you can define your value-add as a series of interactions via a browser, or an interchange of XML messages, nobody can whip the land out from under you."
The above is no longer true. The Web alone is not enough to avoid being a sharecropper.
Right, I see, that's a good quote. However, seeing as software developers always try to move common code into libraries and reuse it, wasn't it a bit naive to expect web apps to be any different?
I think the problems the article is talking about are more akin to library dependencies in desktop/server development rather than (more extensive) platform dependencies and the complexities of targeting multiple platforms.
That was not the initial premise. It was about the web supposedly removing the platform dependencies. Not the technical ones but the business ones - basically an unremovable third party between the developer and their customers. Here's an example of such an article by Tim Bray:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...
Quote: "You’re not a sharecropper, especially not a sharecropper, if you’re building on the Web platform. If you can define your value-add as a series of interactions via a browser, or an interchange of XML messages, nobody can whip the land out from under you."
The above is no longer true. The Web alone is not enough to avoid being a sharecropper.