Just googling for "vertical align text css" should be enough to tell you that different layout is needed. Why shouldn't there be a layout model that makes it easy to do the things people are trying to do?
The idea that we shouldn't even attempt to create a better one is silly.
.vertical-text { display: flex; flex-direction: column; justify-content: center; }
(add ´align-items: center´for horizontal center)
There you go. That CSS is useful for popup dialogs. Though most of the difficulties I see with vertical-alignment are due to poor design and implementation.
HTML and CSS get new features all the time so clearly nobody is saying they shouldn't improve. It's people saying that "HTML is inherently broken so there should be something else but they don't know what" that I am getting sick of.
If you want to align text vertically, you just do
font-size: 20px;
line-height: 40px;
vertical-align: middle;
That said, I'm all for experimenting.
I'm not saying that there aren't a lot of good ideas introduced by the web (documents, hyperlinks, semantic metadata, responsive layouts, accessibility, URIs, etc.). What I'm saying is that there are good parts and there are bad parts, just like with native. What we need is a marriage of the good parts of the web with the good parts of native.
We can do better. Much much much better.
"precursor of html"
HTML is based on XML, a language with two primitives, strings and children. Why would you ever use that as an interface if you want something to ever be performant?
What we need is a retain-mode scene graph, where some of the nodes on the scene graph can be HTML documents (with URIs).
Developers don't want a one-to-one relationship between the window object and documents. They instead want a one-to-many relationship. The <article> tag is proof of this.
Take Twitter for example. What is each tweet, but a 140-character document? The application for displaying an infinite list of tweets is not a document, but a multi-document viewer. The Facebook feed is the same thing.
If anything, this would prevent the shenanigans of blocking viewport resizing, because the user could choose an HTML document node on the scene graph and decide to make it full screen (the same way twitter allows you to click on a time stamp to get a permalink)
This retain-mode scene graph would need to support URIs so that you could always link to a subgraph of the scene graph and only view that part.
No, its not.
HTML is based on SGML (it was originally an SGML application profile, though as of HTML5 it is no longer.)
XML was invented after HMTL, was inspired by HTML, and is also an SGML application profile.
So, insofar as XML and HTML are related all, its closer to the reverse of the relationship you describe.
My point about strings and children still stand though. SGML is a document markup language. It was never designed for complex scene graph work, so I don't get how the OP I responded to came to the conclusion that HTML derived from anything that was originally used for things like applications and GUIs.
Finally, current native programming does not get its power from any advanced technique or technology but only due to its privileged position in an underpowered computing device with a smaller screens and newer touch input methods and hardware. This way, mobile GUI API designers didn't have most of the problems of large screen OS framework API designers had. When I look at their APIs, they are too simple, nothing fundamentally new.
So as mobile devices get better in general computing, a post html world may come back, with stringified description of UI elements.
Xerox Star User Interface http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZBL80JPqw
Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yxCJfayW-8
The Smalltalk-80 Programming System http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLPiMl8XUKU
The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OwG_rQ_Hqw
Symbolics Hypertext Document http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DxYj32cvoE
Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7579613
The Mesa/Cedar programming environment https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=http%3A%2F%2Fbitsavers....
Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk
Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oonXT-gYjU
its not fashion, it is UX, usability, and standardization
You say "hackery is required to attempt to imitate native mobile apps" and I agree with you. Can I ask why it is so important to copy the styling of native? That seems like a lot of effort for no good reason. Mobile web can be better than native if you let it, but forcing it to be something else purely for reasons of fashion is foolish.
HTML/CSS produces a flexible layout that is usable by many different sizes and types of devices (even audio interfaces) and that is a good thing. It takes effort to get it working for all of the possible ways it could be used, but it is possible. After a little practice, it can even get easy. The hard parts of HTML/CSS would still exist in any flexible layout solution. Making a rigid screen-painted layout solution avoids problem inherent in flexible layouts those, but it gives up so much.