One idea that I bring up whenever I see arguments around what features should be added to HTML or what splits should happen is that the DOM is not primarily a layout language, it is a presentation layer.

The really clever, wonderful part of HTML/DOM that is worth keeping around is that it forces you to describe your current page/application state as pure text.

Imagine if every time you wanted to write a GUI app with GTK, you were first required to build a functioning terminal interface, and then (for the most part) only allowed to pull elements from that terminal interface into the main GUI of your app. That is how the web do.

So proposals around, "HTML needs to be its own static thing" kind of miss the point in my mind. Suppose we had an amp-like purely declarative format that replaced HTML and it had some basic controls around data-binding, and infinite scroll, and whatever. At that point, it would cease to be a semantic presentation layer, it would be a document layout tool.

Of course, no system is perfect, there are some exceptions in HTML that blur that line, largely because the web is very messy and its hard to correct mistakes once they're out in the wild. And yes, Google is pushing templates and shadow-DOM, both of which are bad ideas that make the web worse. We can't win everything. But I will still strongly assert that HTML is not here to make you happy as a developer -- HTML is for the user. The point of HTML is that it forces you to describe your interface as semantic data, not pixels.

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To extend off of that point, the other thing I'll go to my grave asserting is that once you start to think of HTML as a user-accessible presentation layer for what your state is right now, you start to realize that the distinction between web pages and applications is kind of garbage.

Most apps are just interactive documents, regardless of whether they're online or on native platforms. There are some exceptions (3D editing software, maps, etc...), but for the most part what I tell UX designers is that if they can't sit down and describe the current state of an application as an XML tree, they probably don't have a very good grasp of what that state is or how to organize it for the user.

I think I can count on one hand the number of apps I have installed on my desktop computer that couldn't be expressed in HTML. Even apps like Photoshop turn out to be XML documents with a few embedded canvases once you really think about them.