Even Flex and ActionScript were better in many ways than the DOM.
My big problem with web application (in a true application sense - not things that are just hypertext and shouldn't be applications at all!) development is that the DOM+CSS model is not made for rich UI experiences. Basic paradigms from desktop applications like spreadsheet cell selection, draggable cards (think Vizio/UML), modals, and MDI / multi-document interfaces are non-standard and brutally challenging to construct in a reasonable way using the DOM.
What I'd invent would pretty much be Silverlight without the Microsoft, honestly - a typed UI framework built on a widget and widget-binding model which would allow a smooth mixture between OS-level widgets (and the accessibility affordances they provide) and hand-controlled rendering/drawing, with a stripped-down runtime enabling resource constrained clients to execute client-side code which would hide / paper over the resource constrained backend connection.
Anyway, I also think this is orthogonal to the argument in this thread, because I think that most of the conversation and the sentiment of the original tweet is to call out applications that SHOULD be hypertext, not applications. For applications that need to be applications, I think things have gotten better, not worse, although they're still pretty bad.
My big problem with web application (in a true application sense - not things that are just hypertext and shouldn't be applications at all!) development is that the DOM+CSS model is not made for rich UI experiences. Basic paradigms from desktop applications like spreadsheet cell selection, draggable cards (think Vizio/UML), modals, and MDI / multi-document interfaces are non-standard and brutally challenging to construct in a reasonable way using the DOM.
What I'd invent would pretty much be Silverlight without the Microsoft, honestly - a typed UI framework built on a widget and widget-binding model which would allow a smooth mixture between OS-level widgets (and the accessibility affordances they provide) and hand-controlled rendering/drawing, with a stripped-down runtime enabling resource constrained clients to execute client-side code which would hide / paper over the resource constrained backend connection.
Anyway, I also think this is orthogonal to the argument in this thread, because I think that most of the conversation and the sentiment of the original tweet is to call out applications that SHOULD be hypertext, not applications. For applications that need to be applications, I think things have gotten better, not worse, although they're still pretty bad.