- XAML

- XUL

- Layout managers like Motif, Swing, Tk, ...

I never had with them half the problems I do have making HTML/CSS work properly across browsers.

Swing didn't have baseline alignment until Java 1.5 iirc, so you couldn't put a label next to a text box without it looking dorky. And the controls felt slightly uncanny on every platform.

No thanks, wouldn't buy again.

Swing is great if one bothers to learn how to use it, instead of relying on the default control behaviours.

What I mean by that, was being aware information like "Filthy Rich Clients" blog, http://filthyrichclients.org/

I have been out of the CSS loop in the last three years.

Can we finally center vertically without lots of tricks in a good way across browsers?

I am not a designer and never managed to control layout in HTML/CSS, as easily as, I do in all the native toolkits I have used thus far.

...well you wouldn't have those problems with XML tags/HTML being used in an app with a framework that uses a custom layout system.

But that isn't the W3C way anymore.

True, the XHTML + XML modules would have brought us there, but another path was chosen.