It’s easier and nicer. But it’s also shitty because of what you mentioned.

The thing is, that’s how it’s going to stay unless people stop using it. You can get this info you mentioned somewhere else, or simply don’t need it, as I said, yes it’s harder and less nice to live without it, but it’s not like you can’t live without live traffic data or whatever. Start using CoMaps, contribute to open street map, leave reviews on other review aggregators, etc etc

I’ve never heard of this. Can you please give some kind of context?

HTML/CSS/JS is just a possible frontend technology. It doesn’t really matter if your frontend is written in that or written in Qt or whatever. What matters in the end is that the developers are good ones. If the developers suck, the frontend will suck.

There aren’t many good developers.

Because this is not log or debug data as OP said. In any case, what do you think would happen with this data? It will be analyzed by some sort of tool because no one could manually look at this much text data. In text, this can be like 1MB of data per second. So in a normal eye tracking session, probably hundreds of MB. The problem isn’t the storage space, but the time it will take to read that in and analyze it each time, forcing you to wait for processing or use lots of memory while reading it. And anyway, in most languages, it’s actually much easier to store the number values directly (in 8 bytes not the 30something this text representation uses) than to convert them to JSON, all languages have some built-in way to do that. And even if not, sqlite is piss-easy and does everything for you, being as simple as JSON.

There is just no reason to do it like that unless you just don’t think about what you’re doing or have no clue.