> We've gotten so far away from semantic documents so we could build "apps".
Exactly. We're still pretending that the browser is some kind of document display application when it's an application runtime. We keep adding more HTML tags and infinite number of CSS properties and features (that never get it right) when what we should have as a better application GUI API. Throw all the hardware acceleration and threading into that instead of @starting-style, transition-behavior: allow-discrete, interpolate-size: allow-keywords and ::details-content and breath some sanity into the platform.
We've effectively re-implemented that desktop/mobile GUI using a bunch of cobbled together technologies and continue to get more esoteric and complicated every year. Hell, I'm not even sold on JavaScript -- it's just as clunky and weird as everything else.
Move document rendering into high-level implementation on top of a better designed low-level API much like how PDF display in browsers is done with JavaScript.
In my opinion the problem is the lack of good GUI editing apps for purely HTML documents and no standard for self-contained HTML docs (that would bundle all the ressources into a single clickable file).
Word for the web basically, but with support for multimedia.
In that sense the web has failed, there is epub but it's not really good.
As a developer, I want a sane platform. Sometimes I want to write documents and sometimes I want to write applications.
> This is sane from a declarative document styling syntax.
Is it? CSS intentionally avoided mixing animation with live layout resolution and now we have a "switch" to enable it. I wouldn't call that elegant.
If we could just hook into layout with code this could have been resolved years ago instead of waiting for browser makers to invent yet another set keywords.
Exactly. We're still pretending that the browser is some kind of document display application when it's an application runtime. We keep adding more HTML tags and infinite number of CSS properties and features (that never get it right) when what we should have as a better application GUI API. Throw all the hardware acceleration and threading into that instead of @starting-style, transition-behavior: allow-discrete, interpolate-size: allow-keywords and ::details-content and breath some sanity into the platform.
We've effectively re-implemented that desktop/mobile GUI using a bunch of cobbled together technologies and continue to get more esoteric and complicated every year. Hell, I'm not even sold on JavaScript -- it's just as clunky and weird as everything else.
Move document rendering into high-level implementation on top of a better designed low-level API much like how PDF display in browsers is done with JavaScript.