> Famo.us is the only JavaScript framework that includes an open source 3D layout engine fully integrated with a 3D physics animation engine that can render to DOM, Canvas, or WebGL.
They raised a fairly large amount of money, but eventually dropped the idea and moved to a totally different market [2].
Grid Style Sheets [3] gets an honorable mention as well. It compiled GSS rules and applied them as fixed position divs.
I've been researching this subject a bit lately. Surprisingly, many of these problems were already solved in the native world by the end of the 90s. The key innovation from the web is that it's a fully sandboxed environment.
Despite all the web's flaws, one area in which it has done pretty well is accessibility. Many native apps leave a lot to be desired when it comes to basic accessibility... Heck, that goes for many "modern" web apps as well. Hopefully browsers expose good accessibility APIs by the time your vision of developers shipping their own rendering engines becomes reality.
[0] http://deprecated.famous.org
[1] https://github.com/famous/famous
You will know WebAssembly is here and in charge when the browsers compile Javascript itself into WebAssembly and take at most a 10% performance hit, thus making it the default. Call it 2022 or so.
The end game, once WebAssembly is fully integrated into the browser, is to expose the 3D API and/or a high-performance low-level 2D API (or both) and slowly, but surely, a "web browser" will become an environment where you download a full rendering engine for a website, written in an arbitrary language that has WebASM support, and in the end both DOM and JS will become merely another option, at which point IMHO neither of them will actually fare very well, excepting their substantial existing install base. Caching will make this feasible as most of the "long tail" isn't going to make their own engine, just use someone else's, and there aren't really all that many sites who can afford to write their own.
While I consider the forces pressing on the browser to virtually predestine this outcome, it is at least 10 years off.
(If it wasn't for the fact that Javascript is still not fast enough to pull this off, I think we'd already see more frameworks that do layout and ship down a lot more divs and such with hard-coded absolute positions, turning the browser into an environment where it simply puts text and images where the server tells it to, and stops doing all this expensive reflowing and layout. You can see on all kinds of sites the desire to do this on the part of web publishers. However, it is impossible to do this on the server side because you need access to font metrics (where you may not be able to force your own), screen size info, browser zoom level, and a whole bunch of other such things that make it impractical to do server-side in a whole bunch of ways. But JS is still at least ten times slower than native code here, plus would take an inevitable penalty accessing a lot of FFI code, so this is currently almost unthinkably infeasible on the client side.)