Most native apps I use today are just interactive documents. This position that we have to abandon the browser because XML can't handle application state gets

Most native apps I use today are just interactive documents. This position that we have to abandon the browser because XML can't handle application state gets brought up a lot and sometimes it's true, but most of the time it's not. I can count on almost one hand the number of native applications I have on my computer that couldn't be reasonably trivially represented in HTML. And even the majority of those apps only have specific sections that would need to fall back to WebGL. Inkscape springs to mind, just because I currently have it open in front of me. There's almost nothing other than the main canvas itself that would require a custom renderer if you wanted to port Inkscape to the web. Remember that HTML is not a layout tool, it's a render target. The point of HTML is just to represent state to users in an XML-based format.