A bit of context: I’m a long-time fan of Kris/Geminis Ancient Dos Games series on YouTube. However Kris has better things to do than spreading it everywhere, so – whenever a new video comes out – I’m sharing it on Facebook / Reddit / Pinterest. For that I created a small (web)app to generate a short GIF preview of the video. This is only needed at this point for Pinterest, since Facebook added proper previews for YT videos a couple of years back (and Reddit had it since I started posting).

While creating this tool, I remember contemplating different options / programming languages / UI toolkits and arriving at the conclusion that “web technologies” (HTML / CSS / JS) are great for it:

• It is cross platform (and the backend is also pretty portable by using technologies like Python or FFMpeg that are available on a wide array of platforms)
• It provides a good set of primitives, some of which would have been difficult to have in a cross-platform manner (such as gif / video playback)
• It has the facilities to provide arbitrary complex UIs

Anyway, just wanted to say that I can see why things like LG’s WebOS exist.