In 2013, the web development blog CSS Tricks ran a poll with a single question: “Is it useful to distinguish between “web apps” and “web sites”? Seventeen thousand people responded. 72% answered Yep. They are different things with different concerns. The remaining 28% answered Nope. It’s all just the web.
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.
In practice, it offers little more than a thought experiment, though a useful one. It can frame a moment of web development practice. Equally useful is tracing the conversation back to one of the earliest times the conversation cropped up, back to the history of DHTML and a company called Oddpost.
I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.
As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.