As an application delivery platform, web technologies certainly are a serious problem. They're literally decades behind the curve in many respects.

A big part of this is the classic problem that tools built for one purpose (presenting hypertext documents with some light interactivity) have been repurposed for something completely different (web apps) because they were what was available, not necessarily what was good. This goes for HTML and CSS of course, but also for JavaScript. Even with the improvements of recent years and the much better runtime environments provided by modern browsers to execute the JS code, it's still a relatively weak language for writing non-trivial applications, and the community is still following numerous practices that we've long known to be unwise and learning lessons that the rest of the application programming world figured out many years ago.

A textbook example is that in JS world, "unidirectional data flow" in modern UI libraries is treated as some sort of amazing new idea. SmallTalk was using the same fundamental principle in MVC in the 1970s. Many variations have evolved in desktop applications since then, dealing with a variety of practical lessons learned from experience with the original concept.

In JS world, it's considered a big new feature of recent years that you can now write code in multiple files, import what you need from one file in another in some standardised way, and thus break your application down into manageable parts for development but ship a single combined "executable". Again, most major programming languages created since at least the 1970s have supported modular design, in many cases with much better support for defining clear interfaces between the modules than JS offers even today.

In JS world, having discovered the concept of modular design and libraries relatively recently, naturally we're now seeing state-of-the-art build tools that use "tree shaking" to import only the code actually needed from one module in another, instead of bringing in the whole module. Dead code elimination has been a bread and butter feature of optimising compilers since... Well, you get the idea.

Next week: Stability and standards are useful things, data structures and algorithms matter, standard libraries with good implementations of data structures and algorithms are how you combine those things to make the everyday requirements easy to meet, and if much of software development is about managing complexity then routinely pulling in minor features from an ecosystem that exponentially increases the number of transitive dependencies you have to manage probably isn't a smart move.

It's not just JS, though. The layout engine in browsers was designed to support HTML documents, reasonably enough. Unfortunately, that means laggy performance in web apps that keep regenerating a large amount of page layout information because of that heritage. A great deal of effort has been spent in recent years trying to work around that fundamental weakness, with varying degrees of success.

Likewise the CSS formatting model were designed around those documents, and again is quite limited in even basic layout needs for an application UI. Some of the bleeding edge changes are making that slightly less painful, but there are still a lot of awkward interactions.

It is true that much of the modern web seems to have been taken over by spyware and ads. I'm afraid that's what we get for having a culture where a lot of people want all their content and services for free, and until we fix that culture we're probably stuck with the ads (and will probably see a variety of laws in the coming years to fight back against the technical victory of ad blockers). But this definitely isn't the only reason the web of today is bloated and slow.