Comment by wwweston

> I am now prepared for 6 comments

Not sure that's the case, if so, I'd expect a comment that shows a little deeper understanding of the issues involved.

"HTML from 1999" isn't the issue. Lynx did fine on that... and HTML from 5 years ago, just like a whole host of non-visual or semi-visual user agents.

brow.sh is... OK, I guess, nice to have around in a pinch, but like most other schemes that rely on a headless full-fledged browser in order to work with applications that have become dependent on JS to merely render content it introduces a glorified screen-scraping layer to something that can easily be much simpler, assuming web application developers can be bothered to think about it.

We don't need to freeze the web at 1999, and some applications fit poorly in a non-visual context. But a little bit of reflection on how the merits of progressive enhancement and moving forward without losing the benefits we had at that stage would be nice. The stage where people cared about such things was pretty amazing in terms of the breadth of devices web applications would in fact work on pretty well.

Also, if you're not thinking about pretty plain HTML version of your app, chances are half decent you're missing an opportunity to engineer your application better whether or not you care about UA interop.

But, you know, if you're pretty sure the browser should be "thought" about as nothing more than The VM That Lived™, by all means, carry on.