For documents, yes. For apps those are obstacles. Apps just need something to draw on.
And then the pretense that developers are the only thing that matter. The web is vastly better than apps because of the dom, because our systems are in a malleable hypermedia that ysers can modify eith userscripts, userstyles, extensions, eith whatever manner of accessible browser/user agent they please.
It's such sad thing to hear people advocating so strongly for the winnowing od possibility. Leaving all responsibility & all power with the app developer sounds perverse to me, sick, unworthy of being called a part of the internet. Not only does "just need something to draw on" not reflect the needs of developers, it represents an mortal threat to user agency.
Another property GUI toolkits have that the web lacks is that the GUI toolkit is usually made of the exact same kind of code you're writing your app in. There's a much tighter integration between the app and the toolkit. The app can extend it much more sensibly by, for example, implementing custom layout algorithms. With the web, there's this issue of the browser implementing all the layout and drawing and doing all the work and you can only provide input parameters to these hard-wired algorithms — you can't build your own.
Yes, I'm aware of those layout and paint worklets being worked on. Yes, they solve some of these problems and thankfully move the web platform closer to feature-completeness. It's still a mess though.
Where I really want to pull the emergency break & call for reassesment is when I hear promotion of turning usercs experineces into mere pixel pushing videos. I still cant begin to express enough what a colossal & masive civilizational downgrade it would be to reduce the web to moving pcitures, animated pixels, which again seems like ongoing chorus of this post. Layout can preserve textual information, but the idea that we just need to let devs paint whatever and fuck hypermedia, fuck structured information, fuck text: it's ballistic out of this world demonic. Truly fallen a proposition. There's so many people eho recognize for example Flutter & it's infernal CanvasKit as the enemy, as a thing no one else can read or understand but which the app can unmediatedly foist upon us. Instead of a shared medium where both sides have respect & powers, there's this ongoing deeply authoriarian undercurrent ehich has infected the world, thay says only the app's concermd matter. That hypermediums are irrelevant- 0% of importance is information & shared mediums, 100% of importance is the top down imposed experience. Users get no say, browsers get no say. To me, to many, this is as dark & bleak & sad a world as could be imagined, forsaking every gain & advance at interconnecting the world for a ludicrously totalitarian view of what software is for.
