Yes, from a purely presentational aspect, HTML/CSS is way better than Win32, etc. Things like a virtual DPI, easy-to-use transparency and alpha blending, no pa

Yes, from a purely presentational aspect, HTML/CSS is way better than Win32, etc. Things like a virtual DPI, easy-to-use transparency and alpha blending, no paint cycles, and much more. However, displaying a modal window and handling messages in a local window-specific message loop is easy in Win32, and much more difficult in HTML/JS. In general, the browser makes it much more difficult to deal with synchronous operations like modal windows and server requests that require the application to wait on the response. This is how you end up with the overly-complicated mess that is callback-hell, which is then solved by another overly-complicated mess called promises. So, presentation functionality = A+, foundational functionality for UIs = D.