> [ ... ] all have a huge available list of widgets with built-in behavior. That simply does not exist in a browser.
Right, so another way to ask my question is: Where Have All The Widgets Gone?
> So, every app is trying to simultaneously fill in a bunch of missing functionality, work across a wide variety of browsers, come up with some sort of themed appearance from scratch, and deliver all the functionality in the smallest possible byte size over the wire.
None of that really sounds particularly novel. If you roll back to the late 80s, native desktop apps were in essentially precisely the same position: missing functionality, people trying to figure out how to write apps across different platforms, themeing systems beginning to develop, all with notable performance issues if you did the wrong thing (in that case CPU cycles and memory were the constraint rather than wire size, and maybe that's enough to be the difference).
Eventually, somewhere near the end of the 90s/middle of the 2000s, most of these things were "solved" for desktop/native, or put less charitably, they stopped changing.
> Beyond that, you end up having to build your own functionality out of a language that was "designed to make the monkey dance when you mouse over it", and a layout system that was originally designed to show _document_ content.
Right, so yet another way to ask my question is: why don't web frameworks fix this by "evolving" toward a widget-like design so that web devs can think about this more like native devs?
Right, so another way to ask my question is: Where Have All The Widgets Gone?
> So, every app is trying to simultaneously fill in a bunch of missing functionality, work across a wide variety of browsers, come up with some sort of themed appearance from scratch, and deliver all the functionality in the smallest possible byte size over the wire.
None of that really sounds particularly novel. If you roll back to the late 80s, native desktop apps were in essentially precisely the same position: missing functionality, people trying to figure out how to write apps across different platforms, themeing systems beginning to develop, all with notable performance issues if you did the wrong thing (in that case CPU cycles and memory were the constraint rather than wire size, and maybe that's enough to be the difference).
Eventually, somewhere near the end of the 90s/middle of the 2000s, most of these things were "solved" for desktop/native, or put less charitably, they stopped changing.
> Beyond that, you end up having to build your own functionality out of a language that was "designed to make the monkey dance when you mouse over it", and a layout system that was originally designed to show _document_ content.
Right, so yet another way to ask my question is: why don't web frameworks fix this by "evolving" toward a widget-like design so that web devs can think about this more like native devs?