I really like this movement of going back to the basics, web 1.0 style web apps/sites.
I do feel however that there can be a compromise, I think we can build our web applications in the 1.0 style and power them up in the 2.0 style, allowing the capability of the client drive the presentation of the application.
I looked into your work - remarkbox and read through all the while hoping/wishing for there would be a self-hosted version that is not prohibitively expensive for a free personal blog. No luck for me. Back to tinkering with self-hosted isso[1] comment system to make it work for me.
https://posativ.org/isso/
Embedded comments requires JS, but ... the discussion forum part of ED (not embedded) works like Web 2.0, that can fallback to Web 1.0 (I mean, static HTML with no JS). Although this is only partly implemented.
If I had your requirements I would look into isso too! Tinkering is a great way to learn as well, keep up the the great work.
If you decide that you would rather tinker on something else, and just want a hosted comment service to be a solved thing for your personal blog, please reach back out and I'll try to work with you.
This is a nice goal, especially if you need portability all the way down (... to IE 5.5 or something).
However, for any larger web application, this increases the testing effort dramatically, as you need to test all possible sets of capabilities (i.e. all kinds and versions of browsers and other clients). This becomes quickly unbearable burden, unless all functionality is 100% provided and battle-tested by the framework.
I do feel however that there can be a compromise, I think we can build our web applications in the 1.0 style and power them up in the 2.0 style, allowing the capability of the client drive the presentation of the application.
For hints on how I'm doing this for Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com) - please read http://russell.ballestrini.net/capability-driven-presentatio...