Why not? The browser is something like a mechanism for delivering text, images, layouts, and interactive scripts. It's highly cross-platform. Quite perfect for many uses, and the popularity of web apps is almost evidence in itself.
CSS is a bit annoying, but with evergreen browsers and flexbox it's getting very good—and even as annoying as it is, it's still mostly easier to work with than most GUI toolkits.
I often think of the browser as something like an X11 server. It doesn't matter how old you are; why don't you think it makes sense?
> Quite perfect for many uses, and the popularity of web apps is almost evidence in itself.
Mobile and micro-services will change that.
> why don't you think it makes sense?
Because I went through the evolution of using text based GUIs, Amiga, Atari and PC GUI toolkits, drawing UIs with the likes of Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C++ Builder. To the modern ones of XAML, Cocoa, QML and so on.
The list is just a bit long to post here. Most of them provided a saner developer experience than HTML/CSS/JavaScript will ever do. Unless we throw DOM away and replace it by something more tailored to applications instead of rendering documents.
Even if the DOM gets replaced, the browser can hardly provide an integrated experience in terms of what any native desktop/mobile environment offers to its users in terms of immersion and interactivity between applications.
It is just no different than using Java with AWT 1.0 in the early years without native widgets and integration to the respective desktop APIs.
Hmm, interesting. I've used a few GUI toolkits, written bindings for GTK+, worked with Java and Swing, etc. Modern web development, especially using React, is in many ways the sanest thing I've come across.
It reminds me of stuff like Emacs, Lisp systems, Smalltalk, etc. Inspectable environments using dynamic languages... But React's model for components and DOM elements seems to me in many ways easier and better than Emacs buffers or Smalltalk widgets.
I use browser developer tools a lot for changing scripts and styles interactively, and while it's nowhere near perfect, it's often extremely useful and convenient, and I think the model has lots of potential.
> It reminds me of stuff like Emacs, Lisp systems, Smalltalk, etc. Inspectable environments using dynamic languages
In a way yes, but only if we can get rid of DOM and have 1:1 parity with desktop APIs.
One ends up piling div elements with CSS and JavaScript, to imitate something that looks like native widgets, but don't behave like them nor can interact with the desktop environment.
I find Qt5's QML to be a million times easier to use, read, debug, maintain. And that is because it is designed as a markup for applications. HTML was never designed for that. Neither was CSS. This is the reason for all this incredibly inefficient HTML webapp madness.
The DOM's main advantage is supposed to be accessibility and portability to different form factors; otherwise, just roll your own UI using Canvas (like I do using WPF canvas anyways for my editor work). It's not clear to me how accessibility could be preserved while allowing for more flexibility.
Mobile and micro-services will change what? Even then microservices are an architectural pattern, it's not inherently tied to a platform, whether it runs native or in the browser.
Many native application on the mobile space are using micro services with a native UI, as a means to provide an integrated user experience with the respective platform features and keeping the business logic portable.
CSS is a bit annoying, but with evergreen browsers and flexbox it's getting very good—and even as annoying as it is, it's still mostly easier to work with than most GUI toolkits.
I often think of the browser as something like an X11 server. It doesn't matter how old you are; why don't you think it makes sense?