I love the idea of a good cross platform sandbox to ship apps. I think it's really unfortunate that we chose a web browser to be that application platform.
The underlying technology is terrible. HTML and CSS are for displaying documents. Things which should be trivial to add to an application UI (add a ListView, anchor element X to be left of element Y, etc) are nigh impossible without using some bloated toolkit anyway. JS is a slow and brittle language to work with.
The fact that the web became an application delivery platform is an unfortunate historical accident that I am not sure we can recover from.
If we devoted 10% of the engineering that went into "web technology" into an actual dedicated cross platform application platform, it would be way better than the web is today. Faster, less bloat, better technology so that we don't need frameworks on frameworks to do a hello world, etc.
There is a possible future where HTML and JavaScript are relegated to historical shims for WASM and <canvas>. I don't know if this is a good future or not, but you want a future with cross-platform apps freed from "web technologies" that's probably the one that's most achievable from the state of things today.
The underlying technology is terrible. HTML and CSS are for displaying documents. Things which should be trivial to add to an application UI (add a ListView, anchor element X to be left of element Y, etc) are nigh impossible without using some bloated toolkit anyway. JS is a slow and brittle language to work with.
The fact that the web became an application delivery platform is an unfortunate historical accident that I am not sure we can recover from.
If we devoted 10% of the engineering that went into "web technology" into an actual dedicated cross platform application platform, it would be way better than the web is today. Faster, less bloat, better technology so that we don't need frameworks on frameworks to do a hello world, etc.