I'd give my left toe to learn to do this in a few lines of code in HTML/CSS3. Desktop centric UI toolkits provide a set of widgets which lets me build up a UI

I'd give my left toe to learn to do this in a few lines of code in HTML/CSS3. Desktop centric UI toolkits provide a set of widgets which lets me build up a UI in a predictable way that respects my sanity. Windows Forms, WPF, Qt, vxWidgets, tkinter, Java AWT, SWT etc they all have warts but ALL of them feel faster than building UI for the web. The problem with web is that there are no consistent set of widgets. Let's take a stupid date picker. A year ago for a project I thought I'd use the HTML5 <input type="date"/> way no Javascript needed! Sadly I couldn't figure out a way to keep the calendar in an always on state so had to resort to jQuery datepicker. So jQuery widgets was an attempt to do what desktop UI does but now that is no longer in vogue. Today on the web there is no consistency, there is no agreed upon toolkit. How many different approaches to widgets does React have? Ideally you would be able to import a web component into your project and use it without worrying about any abstractions leaking.