HTML is done
The point of the article seems to be that HTML is done because it's "basically OK", and everything around it is done because it's awful and can't be salvaged anyway. I hope the next logical step implied here after this is NOT going back to native applications for everything.  The browser-as-a-platform is based on a lousy pro­gram­ming 
  lan­guage ad­dress­ing a lousy ob­ject mod­el and us­ing a lousy 
  stylesheet lan­guage for vi­su­al­s.

I think JavaScript is a suboptimal programming language because it has too many features, and on top of that they tacked on yet more features recently. I wouldn't call CSS lousy either, and the API of the DOM even got better over the years.We almost never phase anything out, and that's a problem, but I think the core issue causing suckage within the 3 pillars (4 if you count the DOM separately) is that they have been explicitly designed to not work together very well. While you can - and often are forced to - extend CSS and HTML with JavaScript, they didn't make the interplay between them especially synergistic.As for  HTML? Not per­fec­t, but plen­ty good enough.

no, I don't think so, especially if we're discarding JS and CSS as garbage, HTML does not deserve to get a free pass.  Even if we want­ed to im­prove it, there are no ob­vi­ous can­di­dates to do the work.

I don't get why we're all of a sudden in an arbitrarily constructed situation where the whole web platform can never be iterated on again. Ever. But if the point is that whatever comes next probably won't come out of a committee that sounds about right.I agree that some of the frameworks mentioned exist to work around the issues we created in the browser platform. Especially the functionality of React should be considered for an adoption scenario, maybe not the exact React API, but something along those lines that makes working on (or at least applying) diffs easier. The same goes for handlebars-like templating. I would rather see some of these adopted than the effort that goes into giving classes to JavaScript.