alt Hacker News> In this role, HTML is a pile of hacks upon hacks that was not originally intended for UIs.
I get where you're going and am genuinely curious, what does a "better" system designed to do what HTML/JS have become actually look like? (or what would one look like?) There has to be markup of some sort, and there has to be scriptable interactions of some sort, right? If not, how else would it work?
Well, yea, that was a remark about HTML's legacy. In pre-AI era, I preferred QML or GtkBuilder (when viable, of course) to HTML any time. Nowadays, to be honest, I don't know.
That said, yes: NeWS, XForms, rio, and many others have tried with arguably cleaner designs. Not without their own issues, but in comparison to HTML, driving GUIs was a design goal from day zero (not a direction shift), and they're a lot smaller and simpler (which has its pros and cons).