As someone who has written several GUI systems from the ground up (including lower-level stuff like font rendering and GPU-accelerated rasterization) I think th

As someone who has written several GUI systems from the ground up (including lower-level stuff like font rendering and GPU-accelerated rasterization) I think the author has many good points. As it turns out, layout and abstraction, as they relate to user interfaces, are two fairly difficult problems. I can say with some degree of confidence that current web standards kind of suck at both of these (I mean, they do an "ok" job, but could be far improved and simplified). This is not entirely anyone's fault (obviously), but rather something inherent to standards. Rather than design a fresh, sensible system, we have been using 20+ year-old standards because...they are the standard. The first thing I would change? The web is no longer just a series of documents, and needs to be treated like a networked application. HTML and CSS should both die, and there should be only one language that dictates the behavior of a given web page (which can easily call other appropriately sandboxed languages). There is a little bit too much black magic - everything should be transparent. Really, the web browser should be the operating system, not the other way around. Everything a web browser does is beginning to look like an OS (tabs are threaded applications, etc). It seems detrimental to design to force applications to appear inside another application (even if there is a fullscreen ability). Just my $0.02 ...