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HTML is not fit for some of what we currently do with it. Its print roots are obvious and _relatively_ well adapted for structuring editorial content. There are

HTML is not fit for some of what we currently do with it. Its print roots are obvious and _relatively_ well adapted for structuring editorial content. There are still many maddening issues when you come from a print background but it is not always clear if they are on the spec author or on the implementor: bad justifying and hyphenation, vertical displacement caused by sup and sub, etc. But the big issue is all the UI stuff that goes around that editorial content, that we have to reinvent all the time or use piles of third-party stuff for. HTML has no tabs, no cards, no popins, no mega menus, no button groups, no steppers, etc. We shouldn't use that "platform" to build applications.

icipiracy 4y ago
It does feel like 'hacking' quite often to get special UIs done in HTML. What do you think is a better platform for the web? That meets similar requirements: - fast to deploy/load cross platform - accessible to build with
- johncoltrane 4y ago
  There is no serious alternative for the purely editorial stuff but still lots of room for improvement. For the application-like stuff… there was some good and some bad in Java applets, Flex, and Silverlight but none of that had a barrier as low as HTML/CSS/JS. I think the way forward is for HTML and the DOM is to adopt ideas from the framework space (like one/two-way binding) and expose more high-level UI elements out of the box. Just imagine something like: <script> const myDataTable = new DataTable() myDataTable.head = ["Foo", "Bar", "Baz"] myDataTable.items = [[1, 2, 3],[4, 5, 6]] </script> <table binding="myDataTable" class="my-data-table" sortable /> with everything needed built into the platform, and no hard need for any third-party framework.