[mrfinn]

How can it be possible that we are in 2024 a no one seems to be proposing the most obvious improvement to the web, which is to create a new standard designed for web applications and let the HTML alone serving it's original purpose, which was to serve documents? (H*T*ML the T goes for "TEXT"!). Instead of that, and make things complex and unmanageable to the extreme, to "improve" things now we dropped out completely the MVC philosophy and went completely ahead with an spaghetti mess of Javascript, HTML, CSS, and create-your-desired-tags-at-will everywhere, aka Components.

PS. And not even mentioning Madnesscript which deserves another chapter in this story of horror.

[mixmastamyk]

It's a herding cats problem. Not practical for new actors to propose one and have it adopted; current principals are no longer trusted. No one else with deep pockets cares enough to donate the resources it would take and/or do the hard coordination work. We don't see viable new Operating Systems either, for example.

That leaves minor feature additions as the only way forward.

[openrisk]

There are probably many reasons. The history of technology development teaches us there are a lot of non-core factors that affect the adoption of alternative designs (influential entities and agendas, network effects, business models of those involved etc.)

But there seems to be also an interesting intrinsic reason: The versatility of the digital "Document" paradigm itself. Text in its digital incarnation (a sequence of human readable strings) is not just your usual text. While printed text on a page involves the encoding and annotation of human language sentences you can encode a lot more things in human readable HTML/SVG/XML formats (e.g. numerical data, visual geometries, declarative UI etc.).

The HTML family of documents is in this sense a sort of "super text". Its structure reflects already its huge dynamic (rich text) potential. But clearly you cannot solve everything in a declarative manner (though you should probably push it as far as possible). At some point the flexibility of code is important and the question then is what is the optimal way to do this (as in: easy, performant, versatile etc.). Alas at the moment we seem to be almost at the extreme opposite: everything as code.

Ideally one would refactor all these declarative formats that have proven their utility and resilience and rethink the role of code / frameworks, taking into account all the developments and learnings of the past decades (web assembly, mobile, pwa etc.).