[protomikron]

> I'm not sure I get why enforcing a layout is a problem from the point of view of application distribution - if nothing else, an app should be able to embed a text renderer and draw onto a <canvas> itself.

Yeah, but in my opinion that is already a specific type of application, like e.g. a computer game, PDF viewer, plotting application.

It is totally different from e.g. an application like Wikipedia or a news page, that provides mostly text and images.

In the end there should just be more of the functionality on client side (rules how to render news pages, how to render wikipedia, etc.).