It would be better to use Rust+Servo (no JS, or at least optional) IMO
At this point why not focus on some actual GUI toolokit, like write a Qt clone in Rust, for real world apps we don't need all the CSS and HTML crap, you need simple layout, GUI components and an option WebView you can embed in the app if needed. Probably there is no commercial interest to pay professional developers with real experience to implement this.
I understand both, I don't agree with either more than the other.
WPF has amazing layouts.
CSS is irritating as hell. Even modern CSS, justify-content, justify-items, seriously?
Flex has so many weird edge cases it is overwhelming. I have used flex type systems in other frameworks that worked 10x better, while Flexbox is way better than what existed before on the web, it is still and endless source of frustration.
And yes, Winforms is 100x more productive than HTML. Awhile back I designed a fully functioning UI in Winforms to get an idea what I wanted my website to look like. I hadn't used Winforms in years. Took me less than a day to get a UI up and running with data binding to my backend and all the features implemented.
TWO MONTHS of web dev later I had the same thing working in a browser.
Now the browser was styled, and responsive, sure. But 2 months vs 6 hours. The loss of productivity there is insane.
What a Qt or other similar frameworks gives you is consistency, all components in all apps will look and work the same (with the exception of customized ones). This means you can focus on UX and not on bad design. My experience is that some bad designer will force his opinion on the users, will force his preferred fonts, font sizes and font colors on the users(making text hard to read), will disabgle text selection for some weird reason, will fuck with the scrollbars because the native ones are ugly etc.
For a working app that is not a music player you don't need the "power" of css, say you seen video games have a small Launcher/config window that hase buttons,drop downs, checkboxes , I noticed those use Qt or Windows Forms. I am also noticing that modding tools , open source tools (that are not GNOME) also focus on functionality and you will not see buttons with round corners, fancy fonts and animated borders.
IMO Electron advantage is not his the "powerfull"css and html and it is that you can reuse the existing node ecosystem and existing web developers and the alternatives are also lacking for higher level languages (GTK is shit IMO)
There is: flexbox and grid. All kinds of alignment can be done with basically a one-liner in both layout systems, without any hacks.
You missed the part with "there should be ONLY 1 way". I know about flex and grid, this are new and thanks the gods we finally we have something decent (not good).
Flexbox is great I wish to magically remove or magically fix all the code that does not use it and instead uses "float" or other shit.
You would say "don't use the other old shit" but my point was that we need a GUI framework that does not have 1 million lines of code for supporting this old stuff. If we really want to use HTMl a language for documents to write GUIs then we should make a new version that is the modern subset of html and css, where you ONLy have 1 way to do a thing (remove or limit the use of float, don't support all boxing models, simplify the layout rules so I don't have to google and find that to make something to work I have to set min=width=0 so the css engine follows a different path and does the correct thing)
Yes, Qt4 is not compatible with Qt3 , Adobe Flex4 was not compatible with Flex3 , I only used at that time this new versions and did not had to work or learn the old stuff. Old projects continued to use the old stuff and continued to work.
It’s amazing how fast the browser can be for this (and tiny) when you aren’t using querySelectors, vDOM, or event listeners.
How do you handle the nuances of GUI and input handling?
Instead of querySelectors I use things like getElementById, getElementsByClassName, getElementsByTagName, and some custom DOM navigation utilities I wrote for this application like getAncestor, getModalsByModalType, getNodesByNodeType, and so forth.
You don't need any kind of framework or fancy wiring to work with events. You always know what you are working with from within the event handler, because event handlers receive an implicit event object as their first argument. From that there is event.target which returns the element the handler is assigned to or event.currentTarget which returns the element the user interacted with that fired the event after bubbling.
State management is also just as easy.
It's more work to reinvent those wheels than bind to them.