So an app had a bug and almost a year later they fixed it. You're right. This scenario never happened outside the web. /s Partial rendering of lists/tables is

So an app had a bug and almost a year later they fixed it. You're right. This scenario never happened outside the web. /s Partial rendering of lists/tables is trivial when the items are not dependent on one another (flow) or you have fixed or easy to compute height (assuming vertical scroll). When that height is determined by thousands of variables, bugs can happen, and what platform you use doesn't matter. But I suspect Twitter's issue is elsewhere entirely and both you and I are forced to speculate POINTLESSLY I MIGHT ADD, on a fixed bug we can't debug the cause of. And saying Twitter is "just text and images" is both terrible oversimplification (it has text in multiple styles, also videos, polls, retweet panels, info cards etc. etc. etc.), and just sounds ignorant. "Just text"? Do you have a clue how varied and complicated multilingual Unicode is at all, not to mention mixed RTL and LTR and so on. You get to say "just text" if you're rendering the visible range of ASCII in a monospace font only. You did it more easily in your toy scenario most likely because your toy scenario had LESS complexity, not because HTML has less capability. You see, there's a reason why people often embed HTML in their apps to show so-called "rich text" in it. It's something that's not trivial to achieve at all in your typical UI kit (beyond basics like color, font-family and size). And unfortunately your coherency remains low, as you're still arguing about things that have nothing to do with your initial thesis that HTML doesn't allow you to do what you want. If HTML has a problem, is that it does too much, not too little. If you take Qt "circa 2005" and try to replicate the exact visual presentation of Twitter.com you'd quickly realize how much HTML gives you that Qt wouldn't. In fact, Qt's own rich text support is a tiny, tiny subset of HTML. Oh, by the way, you don't get to use Qt. You only get to use whatever comes with your OS, because BY YOUR OWN STANDARDS you're very filesize conscious, and "hundreds of kilobytes" was too much for a UI library to use in your web app. Well Qt is several megabytes. You forgot you were whining about kilobytes, right. Low coherence.