Delphi, WinForms, Swing wxWidgets are the old guard, if you want to see what web apps could be in terms of UI development look at XAML (WPF), MXML (Flex), QML (

Delphi, WinForms, Swing wxWidgets are the old guard, if you want to see what web apps could be in terms of UI development look at XAML (WPF), MXML (Flex), QML (QT) -- sane layouts, components, built-in data binding, etc. and still XML/JSON based. Adding something like MXML rendering to web browsers, without changing anything else (I'm not going to go into the JavaScript discussion), would already be a huge improvement in developing proper web _application_ UIs.