(We also would have more sites that looked liked late 90s Flash, but then again, we're moving that direction anyway, just with more effort and convoluted design)
Here's the GitHub repo: https://github.com/w3c/css-houdini-drafts
Houdini looks like its trying to do just that.
That doesn't sound implausible. In fact, it sounds like a great idea. As long as performance and security don't suffer, more and more browser internals should be opened up to JS developers so that we don't have to wait for all browsers vendors to implement specific features before we get to use them.
Know of any examples of that in practice or is this just a joke?
It's very very not ready yet, but I'd appreciate some pointers or PRs.
And other parts of Facebook, like the chat, are hard to describe as a page.
Is this a trick question? :) On the scale from pages to apps, where one end is someone's static geocities page about their cats and the other end is, let's say, github: Facebook is definitely an app.
Sometimes less is more and constraints are good, there are things that you shouldn't shoehorn.
This is actually happening. The major vendor libraries are working on API's to give JS library authors the ability to hook into the browser layout process and define their own layout mechanisms