I find it really hard to rationalise this thought with the thread...

- WebAssembly + Canvas rendering is bad because it turns the web into a bunch of opaque blobs and removes user freedoms and abilities

- The web should only be for documents, not applications

- So it follows that... all the applications which are currently "open" websites should be opaque native app executables where you can't have extensions or adblockers or anything?

To be clear, I agree with the first point. Websites moving to opaquely rendered canvases is terrible. They should remain "normal" DOM/HTML.

I'm not a web developer, so keep this in mind as I clarify.

Application development for browsers is, in a way, a stack of huge hacks on the top of huge hacks. Developers are using HTML and CSS for purposes they were never intended (e.g. a WYSIWYG word processor), and doing some really gnarly hacks to make it all work.

Those gnarly hacks required to make their applications work prejudice web application developers against HTML and CSS, since they don't work worth a damned for those developers.

But HTML and CSS work remarkably well for what they were designed for: Documents.

Applications have, historically, usually been distributed in a different format than documents. Perhaps they should resume that trend; targeting the browser just being the OS, and leaving the document standards for documents.

My knee jerk response to the original article was, "this is making the web less free," but a bit of thought raises the question, "I can't interact this way with Microsoft Word, so why do I expect to interact this way with Google Docs?"

CSS has absolutely never been good at what it was designed for.

It is meant to display a document. It took TWENTY YEARS before it got support for showing text in columns, the most basic of basic things in how text is often displayed.

It is only now, after twenty-five years, getting a way to specify the aspect ratio of an element.

It's an awful, awful joke.

CSS was originally intended to consolidate document style information, so you didn't have to repeat "24 point bold, blue" for all your section titles. It's pretty good for that, but then we somehow decided that it should also handle the entirely separate job of page layout. Which led to years of standards people yelling at us to use CSS and not tables, and then plugging their ears when asked how to implement complex designs like vertically centered text.

HTML and css are great for making application GUIs. I used a bunch of frameworks like qt and Java <some kind of verb> and wpf and they were all worse than php, css and HTML.

I would argue that Tk is even better for making GUIs.

Here is a simple Tcl/Tk application: https://rkeene.org/viewer/projects/tkweb/test1.tk.htm

And here's what that application looks like (in a web browser, as well as natively, bear in mind that this from 2003): https://rkeene.org/viewer/projects/tkweb/tkweb-test1-2.png.h...

Can you describe the resulting layout as well as interactions as well in HTML ?

HTML and CSS were never denigrated. There's not one superficial feature which doesn't make sense. Most of it is barebones. If I had to pick one feature the blows the scope out of proportion, it would be the `is` selector, but that's the only one I can think of

Denigrated ~= put down.

And there's plenty of examples within the comments of this article where people - webapp developers - harp on how bad HTML and CSS are, because HTML and CSS weren't designed for webapps.

CSS is the worst layout language, except for all the others.