HTML was designed as an SGML application for networked hypertext.
As an alternative to what the original post posits, we could leave it for that purpose, and design another (now XML) application for user interfaces: windows, buttons, scroll bars (if desired), text controls (no I'm not talking about textarea for CGI), the kind of controls that Windows or X11+MOTIF provide, expressed as tags in a UIML (User Interface Markup Language). This would have the advantage that we could start from a clean slate, and the open source interpreter for this technology could be integrated into all Web browsers, so behavior would be identical.
UIML would be designed as an XML application for networked software applications' user interfaces.
Of course, you could execute them locally, too. There could be graphical UI designer of the types that already exist, e.g. Visual Studio would just write out a UIML as a new export format.
Crazy idea? Actually, it's just applying the "Do one thing, and do it well." mantra to XML <-> XHTML + UIML instead of packing everything possible into one now-bloated markup language it was never designed to do. So if this comment had a title, it would be "I'm betting on Internet standards" (plural).
It's been done many times. Mozilla had XUL. Internet Explorer had XBAPs (XAML Browser Apps) [1]. Android has an XML UI language. Java has FXML, which IMHO is the cleanest and nicest of the lot.
It never works. Same reason as to why adding non-JS languages never works: because making a GUI toolkit or implementing a language is a huge amount of work, other browser makers refuse to get on board because it'd mean they're playing catchup. Then web devs refuse to use it, because not every browser supports it. The only acceptable way forward is to gradually glue lots of small things onto HTML, and see which ones get implemented by the others. Because this is such an incremental and random process you end up with a pretty inconsistent platform that lacks a lot of stuff you'd intuitively expect.
Wouldn't that be XUL[1] ? It's been there since 1997 and never took off outside of Mozilla, so it was deprecated and removed in 2017. It wasn't meant for use in the wen directly as replacing an entire ecosystem with a completely different way of doing UIs would be close to impossible, all for small benefits.
I agree with this idea. We need a toolkit standard for the web and to stop shoving application code into a document model. What's strange to me is that so many people have been trying so hard to either resist or deny this.
The proposed solution is a non-starter, though. Anything involving XML is probably DOA for the web. I know I don't want to touch it. But something needs to fill this space because UI on the web is so god-awfully atrocious.
As an alternative to what the original post posits, we could leave it for that purpose, and design another (now XML) application for user interfaces: windows, buttons, scroll bars (if desired), text controls (no I'm not talking about textarea for CGI), the kind of controls that Windows or X11+MOTIF provide, expressed as tags in a UIML (User Interface Markup Language). This would have the advantage that we could start from a clean slate, and the open source interpreter for this technology could be integrated into all Web browsers, so behavior would be identical.
UIML would be designed as an XML application for networked software applications' user interfaces.
Of course, you could execute them locally, too. There could be graphical UI designer of the types that already exist, e.g. Visual Studio would just write out a UIML as a new export format.
Crazy idea? Actually, it's just applying the "Do one thing, and do it well." mantra to XML <-> XHTML + UIML instead of packing everything possible into one now-bloated markup language it was never designed to do. So if this comment had a title, it would be "I'm betting on Internet standards" (plural).