Jay’s Web Apps, Web Sites, Are they all the Same? starts referencing an ancient poll on CSS-Tricks. Jay writes:
That question, circulated in different ways, has become a common refrain. Every few years it re-enters the web development zeitgeist. At the center, however, lies the same question: is the web divided? Is there one web meant for desktop-like applications and another meant for content. One web that serves, and another that creates.
The poll proved, at the time, people considered web apps and websites to be different things. Even that last sentence was awkward to write as naming them upfront assumes they are real/meaningful terms, which is exactly what is perennially up for debate. I bet if you ran the poll today you’d find similar results if not even more weighted toward a distinction.
If I think about it intellectually, I would disagree there is any need to make this distinction. The second you slap one label or the other on a website you can instantly think of things that would question that label. A site for a restaurant… that’s a website, not a web app. Well, what if it has its own reservation system?
Yet, I admit that if I think about it intuitively, it feels easy and natural to slap those distinct labels on specific sites. Figma, that’s a web app. Engadget, that’s a website. I’d bet this intuitive response is what has a finger on the scale.
Let’s say we could agree on this bifurcated taxonomy of sites plus the entire set of distinguishing characteristics that put a site in one or the other. Now what? Does it guide our future choices? Does it mean that we need to make one fast but the other can be slow? Does one need to work with assistive technologies but the other doesn’t? Does one need to help users get what they need and the other doesn’t? (No × 3)
My best guess is that people hope it guides their technological choices. You use React for web apps and WordPress for websites. (You need a JavaScript framework for web apps and a CMS for websites.) If that were true, I’d cede that these taxonomies are actually kinda useful. But unfortunately, it falls over immediately. People building React websites that pull data from a CMS API is as rare as a two-winged bird. People building very content-focused websites via JavaScript frameworks because they like the development approach (and it outputs as HTML like any other approach) is also not particularly rare (hi: Next, Gatsby, Nuxt, Astro, dare I say most SSGs). There are a lot of technological choices to make, but they can be made based on actual needs, not because a site happens to fall into a lexical bucket.
Why declare a taxonomy for something that doesn’t matter? Ohhhh right — because as humans we have a really bad habit of othering things. Maybe that’s what is so irritating at this artificial divide. It’s about as rigorous as saying ok, half of you are prisoners, and half of you are guards, and hoping that goes OK.
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