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Shrug. I think this is a good illustration: it’s not the language that’s the issue, it’s the DOM. The DOM was and continues to be a terrible UI abstraction for applications.

What we really needed was Flex or XAML or Swing or even XUL, for that matter, to be built on a sandbox functional enough to make users happy but robust enough to run on the web. Instead each framework failed in turn to various platform dependency and/or security flaws until we ended up stuck with the DOM as our endgame.



Ideas are worth communicating clearly. What does "DOM" mean here? You said XUL, but there was never XUL without the DOM.


using the examples listed as being needed (like swing and flex), it would seem that they meant a visual components library that has "everything" needed for an app.

The "DOM" in this case is referring to the basic elements of a html page. It's like bricks, for which an app UI could be built, but it will be different for every app (both visually, as well as code-wise).

The thesis in the poster's remarks is that there should've been a common application GUI library for the web.


What?

> it’s not the language that’s the issue

And yet we're drowned in build tools, configs, and whatnot to use TS because JS is not sufficient to write sophisticated client-side apps.

Even if there was something like XAML you'd still need a typed language.


Firefox and Thunderbird provide a 20+ year old existence proof to the contrary.




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