HTML, and retained-mode GUIs and DOMs generally, is all you need. Anything more complex is over-engineering. JavaScript was, broadly speaking, a mistake. 90% of

HTML, and retained-mode GUIs and DOMs generally, is all you need. Anything more complex is over-engineering. JavaScript was, broadly speaking, a mistake. 90% of what we need computers to do is do some I/O and put text, colored rectangles, and JPEGs/WEBMs on a screen, and that shouldn't be that complicated. A lot of good things about way we wrote websites and native applications back in the early 2000's were babies that got thrown out with the bathwater. That's why we can't seem to do what we could do back then anymore--at least not without requiring 4x as many people, 3x as much time, and 20x more computing power. (Maybe more than a few people on HN will agree with this, now that I think of it...)