The web is now a competitor for native apps. That would never have been possible without the fast pace of innovation. Don't knock it.
I was last a "web developer" almost two decades ago, but dipping back in on a few occasions I am always appreciative of how much innovation has happened since then.
The world before the huge investment in browser technology was dark. Tables and spacers for meaningful layout and flash or shockwave for anything interactive.
I remember a time when css based drop down menus were seen as some sort of state of the art.
They still are on mobile for navigation - full screen sans js
Things that definitely look like trivial banality at shallow level often end up to need a lot of attention on many concurrent details.
I'm talking about a time when investment in browser development and web standards was so lacking that being able to achieve things like this blew everyone's mind:
https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/edge/menus/demo.html
Hackernews, were it around back then, would've gone as crazy for this post as we do the latest AI model today.
Maybe! My thoughts were, say, tangential or incidental.
A guess is that a central issue is how much in new features should we develop and use?
I see a dilemma: (A) I mentioned the old controls that go back to early Windows and even IBM's 3270 terminals. An advantage of these controls is that lots of software tools implement them and billions of people already understand them. (B) Being too happy with the old stuff or even the present risks progress that is possible and worthwhile.
Your post seemed to illustrate (B).
But generally in the industry, with smartphones, laptops, desktops, Apple, Google's Android, Windows, browsers, apps and extrapolating, we could have an explosion of new features that would complicate work for everyone and fragment the industry.
Ah, maybe Darwin would explain: Lots of mutations with only the best lasting??
For my work, I'm thrilled with the tools and technology available now that I get to exploit.
Fixed that for you.
I'm pretty happy not to have "submit to Apple for meticulous review and approval" in my deployment cycle.
The main point that we could derive from this is that it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, and all the more when geopolitics is involved. But still it's fun and sometime inspiring.
It's like people got mad that tables were being used to for something other than strictly tabular data, so they recreated the idea behind table as a layout tool with "css grid" and made it 50x more complicated.
I wish web design could follow like woodworking where the most focus is on using the base tools very effectively. The introduction of new tools is mostly frowned upon. Of course that's all because of the inherently dangerous nature of using power tools. Regardless of tech stack you aren't to likely to lose a finger from coding.
Sigh.
Would it be better if there was a different web application display technology, not retrofitted on top of HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even separated from the success of Javascript, it's an archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to market success.
Then I would say you have never understood HTML. Using tables for layout conflates content/structure/semantics with presentation and this is a problem in general with the HTML standards prior to HTML4 Strict. The reasons why this is bad have been expounded upon for near thirty years and are well known. HTML tables are not a “base tool” for layout.
A good litmus test for bad Web-design is “does it fail on screen readers?”. Indeed this does; it makes pages near unnavigable.
It most certainly is not. Web apps still suck ass compared to native. It's just that users are willing to accept even the crappiest solutions because they don't have very significant needs.