What's wrong is we are trying to fit a round peg(general desktop apps) into a square hole(flowable document delivery model as envisioned originally by Berners-L

What's wrong is we are trying to fit a round peg(general desktop apps) into a square hole(flowable document delivery model as envisioned originally by Berners-Lee). It is easier to make UIs with Winforms, Qt, WPF, heck even with Actionscript it was more managable than with DOM. The problem is that there is no unifying standard, no single vision. There are competing frameworks but they leak abstractions all over. For example I am making UIs with ipywidgets which is basically JS on the front end and it at least a couple of abstractions too deep to fully understand it. To emphasize how stupid making UIs using web is, let's take something simple like dropdown. There is no such thing in the web standards, we use ul, ol etc and then we fake it/add another abstraction with a library or framework In an ideal world dropdown would be a web component that could be imported, then be styled and events would be bound.