Memory-unsafe programs on the desktop should go the same way as the HTML layout model.
Check out Yoga [0]. It's a small layout engine based on flexbox and the CSS box moel. It doesn't cover all use-cases, but it's pretty powerful for its size. I
It's important to remember that CSS and the DOM was initially created and developed with certain kinds of documents in mind. Both are certainly quirky and missing a lot of features, but I wouldn't say they're as bad as many people make it out to be. Based on my experience with native desktop toolkits, they're all quirky in one way or another. One of the biggest issues with modern CSS is that it doesn't have sensible defaults for web apps.
Could you provide an example of your preferred approach to handling layout and styles, and talk a bit about what why you consider it superior?
What key features do you consider missing from CSS and the web?
Also css lacks properties for controlling wrapping limits and non-linear image scaling. And for some reason I always have to optimize on either width or height, I can't control both perfectly.
I'm unclear on what you mean by wrapping limits and non-linear image scaling. Could you provide an example of what you'd like to achieve?
As for having to optimize for width or height. Have you looked into display: grid? I believe it may help enable the kind of layout you're interesting in achieving.
Of course, there are books and guides to help people, but how would someone figure out which guides are worth it? There are a lot of highly rated books on the topic of web development and if you don't already know what you need, it can be daunting.
But yes, flexbox is great.
The same idea may be applied to an operating system's ability to allow a user to operate on their machine.
Edit: It would be useful to consider why the need for a universal interface to the internet was originally sought out.
I think, here, we might looking at it with the wrong lens. I'm unable to find the right words to say this. Let me say this statement feels ungrateful. Web is the largest and fastest growing ecosystem of software we've right now (refer: community size, number of projects on github, say, in Javascipt, CSS, and other web technologies).
You're comparing what is what should've been. By that measure, any human activity will fall short of not only yours but anybody's expectations.
You'd think that getting sane layout control is easy, but apparently it's not. Getting a lot of humans to agree on a fast growing technology is hard (it seems like).
PS: I'm not saying "nothing could've been better, be happy with what you have", not at all. I'm just saying this seems like complaining and a better approach is to try and make it better
I needn't have written up a long tirade for such a simple statement. I see that this is the same sentiment that's espoused by several others in this thread, and thought I'd try and provide a different perspective to look at this with
edit: formatting
Microsoft stuff was going for fixed screen size/resolution, fixed layout, and using a quite limited set of controls.
Web browsers try to be accommodating by default - any screen size (including mobile), zoom built in, and significantly more powerful control primitives that allow enormous flexibility in the way to design things.
If you're building forms applications that only need to work on a PC, the old way was certainly easier, and in fact, Microsoft has WebForms (regular ASP.NET - not MVC or API) that is pretty similar (and doesn't horribly break down so long as you color within the lines, so to speak).
Try to imagine your vb6 app being able to scale down to window the size of a phone screen, and how the WYSIWYG editor for that works even work - I imagine it would be fair to describe it as "hot garbage" also.
I say this because it took me zero effort to use due to how intuitive it was to get started...
MS tools are still here for those of us doing native Windows development.
Also the Apple and Google GUI tooling for their mobile OSes are quite good.
Much of the complexity of web design is not in the tools; it's in the fact that users don't expect a standard whatsoever, they just expect their UIs to be as slick and customly designed as magazines. If every website was written using the same standard, predefined set of widgets and components, the complexity would disappear.
Users expect every website to have a unique identity (unlike anything built with WinForms), that is what creates the complexity.
If you actually use something like bootstrap, your website will look unoriginal, but it will be dead easy to make.
This lack of support for anything other than hardcoded absolute layout is exactly what made it so simple and easy to use. It's the equivalent of doing document layout by padding with spaces - it works for simple cases, and it's very easy to teach people, but it's a mess for anything even remotely complicated.
Properiatery low-code tools built over the web are a better starting point.
Good lord I hate this buzzword bingo. How the hell are proprietary low-code tools better? In what world is that a sane response?
Meanwhile I've struggled to get things looking well with GTK+ or Tcl/tk. Especially when the UI I'm trying to make is dynamic. The tooling has never seemed very condusive to "fit content"-style UIs
That's where I still run into problems with CSS too. However, at some point, and not because I started using flexbox / grid, CSS did click for me and now it's mostly second nature to get the layout that I'm going for.
My feeling on this whole topic is that while as a web developer I have often thought "there must be a simpler way", every time I actually start to imagine what that would look like I end up re-imagining something similar to the web stack as it is now. There is a lot of inherent complexity to GUI-based networked client-server applications that need to be responsive, continuously integrated, database-backed, real-time, etc.
