I'm fully on board with this.<p>I've been trying to get people to realize the power of the browser as a ubiquitous runtime for local software (akin to the way that /usr/bin/python and /bin/bash are situated to run scripts loaded from disk). But there's evidence of an obvious mental block when I try engaging with people. It's as if when you speak about the browser, people immediately start slipping and don't stop until they've arrived mentally at a thin client interacting with an application running on a remote server. No. I'm talking about <i>documents</i> that are meant to be <i>saved to your machine</i> and later opened from a file picker (with e.g. Ctrl+O) or double clicked in your file manager. They also happen to be able to be made interactive, and are self-contained, not unlike a partially baked spreadsheet with macros ready and willing to accept your input.<p>The author is spot-on with the metaphor to woodworking jigs.<p>If there's some criticism I have, it's here:<p>> The goal is not to produce a system that runs forever as has historically been the aim of software for the government and, subsequently, large tech behemoths.<p>The perverse thing is that this method of development is <i>more</i> likely to produce something that can run "forever", accidentally doing a much better job than any SaaS peddler. The biggest threat to this is the shrinking land area, as one tech behemoth uses its leverage (although all browser vendors are complicit) to force more people to conform to its expectations of fitting into the contemporary webdev mold when it comes to what media a commodity browser will accept.<p>And then, aside from that, I'm struck that the author may be overly focused on collage. I've said it before: self-contained HTML is (in many cases, at least) an acceptable substitute for office file formats. You can even get your traditional office suite to give you HTML instead of its native format, usually. Here's to hoping that this remains viable as the affordances of file:// space are chipped away.