it was called CROSS PLATFORM APPS

Absolutely not unless it's as sandboxed as the web (which even the web isn't sandboxed that well).

Working with software has only made me not trust software (that's not open source.)

Why we're giving any random software full user level access in 2026 is beyond me.

We can't afford the ram to run it anyway.

Telnet IS TCP. "Telnet wrapped in a thin layer of XOR" might fit better?

just archiving this comment here:

And yet on my phone I wish websites would stop hawking the native app and just let me use the site. In a way I suppose this is the same complaint since the native apps are often a web wrapper with telemetry.

I used to put the forms inside of invisible tables, as was the style at the time.

Normally these are meant to be ironic but I kind of vibe with this one.

Fuckit, if anything more fancy than HTML + CGI is needed, there's always VRML.

....holy shit, it just dawned on me.. VRML + CGI? Today's PCs should have no issue rendering it, and server-side should be the same as any other CGI page. I gotta do some experimenting with this.

UPDATE: I actually did some research into this, and the possibilities are actually quite extensive. In theory it should be possible to make an extremely basic multiplayer FPS game.

I would prefer webapps to native if there was a protocol to fully load the page and disable network traffic for apps that work fully offline. It is more secure to run an app in the browser because off the layers of isolation in modern browsers. Native apps can access all sorts of information and system resources, which could be used to compromise the host OS.

cross-platform apps

Looks inside: chromium without the url bar

My favorite part is how this meme itself consists entirely of plain text plus a little styling.

To be fair web is still more cross-platform UI than anything else while Apple and Google try to distance their compatibility even further.

Well I totally agree with it :) (even if it should be ironic)

Http ruined the gophernet.

Not completely a joke

No, seriously. Web sucks for GUI. Every basic UI framework does a better job at accessibility, not to talk about performance or weird bugs because it expects Chrome (cross-platform, huh?) to simulate a GUI on a Document Object Model, graceful degradation be damned. And buttons, forms, is something you don't need JS for. You do a poor job if you do.

I tried to get on board with this one, but "cross platform apps" made me throw up in my mouth a little. The unholy things we did back then are best left forgotten in their shallow binary graves.

Honestly images were a step too far. And bring back the blink tag.

I would prefer webapps to native if there was a protocol to fully load the page and disable network traffic for apps that work fully offline.

Yeah! Make things easier for AI to scrape please!

I don't get it, sorry.