This is stated like unanimous agreement is a foregone conclusion.

The Web is for content. Just because people do build in-browser facsimiles of mobile-style app UIs doesn't mean that the flattening of content and controls into a single stream is something that everyone agrees is a good thing and what should be happening. They should be doing the opposite—curbing/reigning it in.

You mean your promise—the position of the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group.

Have you considered that the problem might have been you and what you were trying to do? You're already conceding failure at what you tried. Would it be so much worse to say that it was the wrong thing to have even been trying for?

You mean developers will gain.

Fuck developers.

Jesus fucking Christ. Fuck this shit.

This has been giving me problems in the latest Firefox releases. It ends up throwing an error.

The fact that this book is an SPA—instead of just, you know, a bunch of web pages—is very annoying.

Totally screws up my ability to middle click the "links" in the TOC.

It also messes up the browser scroll position when clicking back/forward.

It's also just annoying when trying to get at the original resource (or its URL for reference).

Is it, though? From where I'm sitting, GitHub has been good for exactly two things. Getting the uninteresting one out of the way first: free hosting. Secondly, convincing the long tail of programmers who would not otherwise have been engaged with the FOSS scene to free their code, by presenting a shimmering city on the horizon where cool things are happening that you'd be missing out on if you were to remain stuck in the old ways that predate the GitHub era's collective mindset of free-and-open by default. That is, GitHub strictly increases the amount of free software by both luring in new makers (who wouldn't have created software otherwise, free or not) and rooting out curmudgeons (who would have produced software of the non-free variety) with social pressure.

I'm less convinced of the positive effects on "the choir"—those who are or were already convinced of the virtues of FOSS and would be producing it anyway. In fact, I'm convinced of the opposite. I grant that it has "changed the way [people] collaborate", but not for the better; the "standard way of working" referred to here by my measures looks like a productivity hit every time I've scrutinized it. The chief issue is that undertaking that level of scrutiny isn't something that people seem to be interested in...

Then you have GitHub's utter disregard for the concerns of people interested in maintaining their privacy (by not exposing a top-level index of their comings and goings to anyone who asks for it —and even those who don't—in the way that GitHub does, again, whether you asked for it or not).