> [native] much harder to develop Balderdash! Tools like Delphi/Lazarus, Visual Basic, Clarion, PowerBuilder made it snap. Sure, they may not be "enterprise" o

> [native] much harder to develop Balderdash! Tools like Delphi/Lazarus, Visual Basic, Clarion, PowerBuilder made it snap. Sure, they may not be "enterprise" or for writing word processors, but for everyday CRUD they are far simpler than typical web stacks. I lived it and did it. Everyone thinks tools that don't scale (team size or performance) should be dumped, but doing things well at the smaller end is a good thing. One size rarely fits all well. > are implemented completely different on each platform. Lazarus can do Windows, Mac, and Linux. But I'd really like to see a state-ful GUI markup standard so apps could send text (HTTP) gui commands/XML instead of tie them to binary libraries. > they are way more limiting in terms how things should be done "Should be"? Biz wants practical over time-drain-idealistic. Too much should-be is a YAGNI violation. > web standards are battle tested and improve every year Any commonly used standard has that benefit. And web standards are a poor fit for GUI/desktop/CRUD. You'd have to break backward compatibility to solve that because DOM is inherently flawed for that need.