"Please someone, write that !"... We actually have written something similar for our product Elevate Web Builder (commercial, closed-source, written in Delphi)

"Please someone, write that !"... We actually have written something similar for our product Elevate Web Builder (commercial, closed-source, written in Delphi), and have considered moving it to Free Pascal in order to allow developers to use it in portable, native desktop applications. The IDE for Elevate Web Builder has to provide a browser-like design-time environment for the WYSIWYG designers, so we created one. It effectively uses a DOM element tree structure like the browser, but doesn't use HTML or CSS. Instead, it surfaces all declarative styling as element properties (with real types, not everything as a string), provides its own layout management that is more application-oriented instead of document-oriented, and has a great batch update functionality that allows you to suspend updates/repaints until you're done making all necessary changes to the element properties of one or more elements. The reason why it's such a compelling idea for us is because Free Pascal is a blank slate with all of the support code for multi-platform development, and we already have all of the code written for Windows. The reason why we're hesitant is because it's all in Object Pascal, so I'm not really sure if it's a compelling draw for JS developers that want to create desktop applications. If we ever do something with it, though, we will certainly post it here as a "Show HN".