It's easy to learn, easy to make and easy to distribute, (at least in the beginning) which is why a disproportionate number of new developers start with web technologies.
Re:Electron 2.0.0 beta
by Aaargh20318 on Thursday February 22, 2018 @10:33AM
(#16438200)
> It's easy to learn, easy to make
I disagree completely. It's easy to get a 'hello world' type thing working in HTML, sure, but it's very hard to make something behave like you want. Traditional UI toolkits are much simpler and easier to understand.
Exhibit A: CSS centering.
Exhibit B: The so-called "Holy Grail" layout. [^1]
This is really out of date. Even IE11 supports flexbox. It is trivial to center things both vertically and horizontally, and easy to make a “Holy Grail” layout.
If you don't need to support IE11 you can use CSS Grid and do the entire layout in one or two CSS properties.
Really ? Because rendering HTML/CSS is an extremely complex way to render a UI, and it was clearly never designed for it. HTML was intended to add markup to documents, not build user interfaces. It lacks the most basic layout primitives you want to use in a UI and a lot of behaviour is either not well defined or not well understood, mainly because it's unreasonably complex. It's easily the most complicated way to build a UI we have right now, which is why we need all those stupid frameworks built on top of it to make it somewhat usable.
HTML is and has alway been a huge mistake for building UI's.