HTML is the Web
Unpopular opinion... but I think this is a too limited view of the web. My contrary opinion is that the <i>actually</i> important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin &quot;walled garden moral police&quot;.<p>It would be nice if operating systems would be exactly that, but for some reason &quot;commercial&quot; OS vendors are not able or willing to provide a safe &quot;native&quot; sandbox completely uncoupled from curated app stores.<p>The ability of a browser to be a document viewer with a very limited layout system should be implemented in an optional layer on top of a bare bones browser.<p>Again, this should all be provided by the underlying operating systems (click an URL and instantly run cross-platform applications in a safe sandbox), but for some reason we didn&#x27;t get that. It&#x27;s the same with Electron apps by the way, those wouldn&#x27;t exist if operating systems would come with cross-platform UI frameworks that are actually better than the unholy mix of HTML+CSS+JS. But Microsoft, Apple etc... had decades to get their act together without delivering.