[withinboredom]

That smells suspiciously like the Linux desktop environment. There was X. It was a minimal desktop environment. Then there were dozens of ones built on that… there was almost no way to have a consistent experience for a really, really long time.

I really don’t want to do that again.

[josephg]

Yeah, but the web isn’t very consistent already. The main set of common elements are buttons, links, form elements and scroll bars. Just about everything else is done custom on every webpage you visit.

I don’t think we should get rid of the common UI elements (if anything we need more of them & better APIs for them). But what Google docs, and flutter seem to really want is a simpler, more primitive way to create a layout out of those UI elements. Buttons and scrollbars are great. We need something more primitive than the DOM and CSS. Houdini is a solid start here.