That certainly used to be the case, but look at something like QML for Qt, and it's typically far more declarative and succinct than (most) HTML, eg: http://doc

That certainly used to be the case, but look at something like QML for Qt, and it's typically far more declarative and succinct than (most) HTML, eg: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlfirststeps.html http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qmlfirststeps.html I'm not a frontend whiz by any means, but I've always found the widget-centric (GUI) approach fit my mental model better than the HTML centric one. SPA architectures help, but I find most HTML designers tend to prefer raw HTML to any composed/widget approaches. CSS (as a concept) is actually quite great, which is why you've seen the older GUI approaches adopt it. Qt itself is also leading more towards a reactive approach where you interact with an abstract data model, and the UI reflects the updates.