[MrJohz]

> Imagine a world where you just had drawing and input handling primitives on the web.

Good news! We do have those primitives! The canvas element can - and is - used for drawing, and input events are fairly easy to manage. Larger projects like Google Docs or Figma often go in this direction, because for very complicated applications, it's useful to be able to handle every part of the rendering process yourself.

That said, it turns out having a rich selection of easily-debuggable, accessible components attached to a powerful layout engine is also really useful, hence why people mostly stick to the DOM unless they specifically need something that only canvas can offer.

[Spivak]

This misses the point entirely, what I mean is that if we didn't already have DOM we wouldn't invent it again — we would invent something like UIKit that has all your premade debuggable accessible components but without the kludge of the DOM.

I think this gets to the core of web devs seemingly not knowing anything else. Not knowing that, from a technology standpoint, how much better you could have it.

[MajimasEyepatch]

No one uses the DOM because they think it’s the best possible GUI technology. They build software for browsers because browsers are the lowest common denominator for distribution, which is far, far more important than technical considerations most of the time. And because of that, there’s also a large ecosystem of well understood, well documented, widely used, beginner-friendly tools for it, ranging from jQuery to React to Tailwind to WordPress.

We can talk all day about how there are better ways to do it, but until you solve the distribution problem, the technology doesn’t matter. Mobile apps sort of solved it, but even then, the bar for installing an app is higher than the bar for clicking on a link. Plus there are cross-platform tech and policy differences to deal with, you can’t guarantee your users are running the same version of the app, etc.

[Spivak]

I'm not really disagreeing with you so much as wishing that webdevs had access to a better UI toolkit because the current state of things makes life harder unnecessarily.