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

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.