You write this as if a "webpage" is one single thing. Maybe you picture a simple news article or blog entry - sure, it's fundamentally a document, HTML is almost purpose-built for publishing that kind of content.
On the other hand, there are countless webapps that are being built to replace what used to be (or would normally have been written as) desktop applications. The document model is poor fit for these. SPAs deliver a better, application-like experience.
These two things can coexist on the web. It doesn't have to be all one or the other. Flutter obviously targets the app experience, and you'd be foolish to use it to target the document experience. You'd be just as foolish to go the other way; page-oriented admin UIs (example: Shopify) are awful.
There is next to nothing about the DOM that doesn't already support application-like experiences. Yes, it was designed with documents in mind, but this claim that documents are antithetical to applications is something I fail to understand. Most SPAs fail to live up to their promise, not because there is something about the DOM that is incompatible with a type of UI, but because the chain of command in software development, especially when it comes to web apps, is dysfunctional. However, there are plenty of native apps that are bad at what they do as well. The difference is that the web attracts different kinds of developers, given that the bar to entry at every stage of development is significantly lower than iOS or Android development.
If you'd like to provide some examples of how the DOM itself works against application-like experiences, I'd love to hear them.
> Yes, it was designed with documents in mind, but this claim that documents are antithetical to applications is something I fail to understand.
You fail to understand it because it doesn't make any sense. It's just a bunch of cantankerous complaining excuses that all serve to under mind the only computing medium users & developers have ever gotten to cooperate on.
Most of the big players are using WebComponents. Once you start using the web well, the web's html looks a heckuva lot like Android Layout xml, or any other widget tree in any other "application" system. (Oh except it also has better out of box experience & better support for arbitrary zoom and reactive sizing.)
> Most SPAs fail to live up to their promise, not because there is something about the DOM that is incompatible with a type of UI, but because the chain of command in software development, especially when it comes to web apps, is dysfunctional.
Here here!
Most companies make bad apps, period. It's just more visible on the place where we use dozens or hundreds of different sites a day, many of which we've rarely see, and no one uses apps anywhere remotely that actively.
You write this as if a "webpage" is one single thing. Maybe you picture a simple news article or blog entry - sure, it's fundamentally a document, HTML is almost purpose-built for publishing that kind of content.
On the other hand, there are countless webapps that are being built to replace what used to be (or would normally have been written as) desktop applications. The document model is poor fit for these. SPAs deliver a better, application-like experience.
These two things can coexist on the web. It doesn't have to be all one or the other. Flutter obviously targets the app experience, and you'd be foolish to use it to target the document experience. You'd be just as foolish to go the other way; page-oriented admin UIs (example: Shopify) are awful.