HTML and CSS were not designed for building software. There's a reason it's nearly impossible to implement a web browser from scratch these days. The spec is

HTML and CSS were not designed for building software. There's a reason it's nearly impossible to implement a web browser from scratch these days. The spec is an ancient monster. Adding more layout options to CSS doesn't simplify things, but only complicates. How many ways are there to layout stuff these days? Try explaining flexbox to a newbie. HTML was meant for hyperlinked documents. It may be ok for that, but it's inappropriate for apps. Who cares about semantic meanings of DOM nodes in an app? I don't think people prefer web dev to desktop dev, but really there's no choice if you need to support multiple OSes. Swift UI is a much more consistent development experience for example. Visual Basic was that for Windows. But cross platform? The only real target there is Skia.