It saddens me that the software industry has been flailing around for at least 15 years trying to resolve the tension between having zero-install + standardized

It saddens me that the software industry has been flailing around for at least 15 years trying to resolve the tension between having zero-install + standardized framework and having a rich UI toolkit that can do "real" apps without making developers crazy. The answer seems to be this weird cycle of layering reinvention atop reinvention because nobody can just blow up the whole stack and rethink it with any market success. Using the DOM + scripting pattern with a DOM more suited to "rich app" development has been tried multiple times as plugins (FLEX and Silverlight come to mind). But the gravitational pull of zero-install + standards crushed them. We also have in progress what is essentially a reinvention of the JVM idea (WebAssembly) but without the UI layer to go with it. That may be successful in its narrow niche, or it may try to overreach into the UI layer and fail like all the others…too soon to tell.