I think this is a problem of the mainstream conception seeing the future browser mainly as a monopolized, walled garden (compared to GNU/Linux, which nowadays w

I think this is a problem of the mainstream conception seeing the future browser mainly as a monopolized, walled garden (compared to GNU/Linux, which nowadays would do everything one wanted from a computer and more) with the canvas being a kind of framebuffer. Back when I first read about the canvas, iirc there was no fancy CSS, no fancy custom elements and making a simple doodle-element or the famous doodle-jump as a webapp was ... - well, I guess there was flash. So if you think of HTML and DOM as a GUI toolkit, it filled an important void (and continues to do so) but nowadays noone wants to use (standardized) HTML anymore, so... If you look into tk (or nowadays tkinter) you basically see the same with the Canvas-class (I think you can't draw anything custom at all in tk easily)!