In browsing through some of the fallout from the arrival of [Facebook's Instant Articles](http:/
In the first, he takes on [the ongoing debate about apps vs. the web](https:/
> Here’s an absolute fact that all of these reporters, columnists, and media pundits need to get into their heads:
>
> The web doesn’t suck. Your websites suck.
>
> _All of your websites suck._
>
> You destroy basic usability by hijacking the scrollbar. You take native functionality (scrolling, selection, links, loading) that is fast and efficient and you rewrite it with ‘cutting edge’ javascript toolkits and frameworks so that it is slow and buggy and broken. You balloon your websites with megabytes of cruft. You ignore best practices. You take something that works and is complementary to your business and turn it into a liability.
>
> The lousy performance of your websites becomes a defensive moat around Facebook.
In other words, if the [mobile web is dead](http:/
On a side note, I wonder if this isn't alot of the reason that millennials have increasingly [preferred using apps to browsers](https:/
In the [second piece](https:/
> Instead of viewing the web as a single platform, it’s more productive to consider it to be a group of competing platforms with competing needs. The mix is becoming messy.
>
> 1. Services (e.g. forms and ecommerce, requires accessibility, reach, and security)
> 2. Web Publishing (requires typography, responsive design, and reach)
> 3. Media (requires rich design, involved interactivity, and DRM)
> 4. Apps (requires modularity in design, code, and data as well as heavy OS integration)
Just to drive this point home, he makes reference to the Apple Pointer issue from [earlier this year](http:/
> This is just one facet of the core problem with the web as an application platform: we will never have a unified web app platform.
>
> What Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla want from web applications is simply too divergent for them to settle on one unified platform. That’s the reason why we’re always going to get Google apps that only work in Chrome, Apple Touch APIs that are modelled on iOS’s native touch model, and Microsoft Pointer APIs that reflect their need to support both touch and mouse events on a single device at the same time. There really isn’t an easy way to solve this because standardisation hinges on a common set of needs and use cases which these organisations just don’t share.
A more conspiracy-minded individual might even believe most of the major vendors would be better off if the standards never really do work out, since it would prevent "native-esque" web apps from cutting into their bottom-lines in their respective app stores. But I digress.
Speaking for myself, I know that I had never really considered this point when talking / ranting about "the web". What's more, I wonder if half of our inability to come to agreement on some of these issues is simply a matter of terminology getting in the way of having meaningful conversations. I mean, apps aren't "better" than "the web", because they are essentially part of (one form of) it: they use the same web protocols (HTTP / HTML) as the rest of the "browsable" web, they just use them on the back-end before glossing it over with a pretty "native" front end.
In fact, one might argue that this is the reason that the one area of web standards that has actually seen some progress in the past few months is the [HTTP2 spec](https:/