I've also been thinking about the same sorts of things lately.
Mostly I've been thinking about the GUI issue on the web. CSS and the DOM are just not up to the task of creating a responsive app GUI. The incredibly complex set of nested CSS rules that need to be calculated and applied for each reflow is a nightmare.
I personally think the DOM is a fine way to define an app structure. GUIs are after all containers and components which map nicely to nodes in a tree.
CSS is great for presentation (colors, font styles etc). One of its strengths is its simplicity and its cascading nature.
What we need is a sane constraints-based layout model. This is standard fare for native apps (eg: iOS autolayout).
Imagine being able to specify:
Block_A sits at the top of the window.
Block_B is anchored to the bottom edge of Block_A.
Block_C is inside of Block_B and is anchored to the left edge.
etc..
A complex layout can be defined in a handful of rules which even JS can solve for.
Solvers for these types of optimization problems have been around for 20+ years. There's even a nice one written in JS eg:
I don't have any experience with Qt&QML, though I've heard lots of good things about it.
I don't think a wholesale replacement of HTML/CSS is feasible though. There's just too much inertia behind the incumbents, not to mention that HTML/CSS is very good for the document centric web which applies to 90%+ of the existing web.
More flexible CSS layout modes such as display:flex are quite usable and go some of the way to addressing app-style layouts, however movement on these standards is slow and doesn't go far enough IMO.
Mostly I've been thinking about the GUI issue on the web. CSS and the DOM are just not up to the task of creating a responsive app GUI. The incredibly complex set of nested CSS rules that need to be calculated and applied for each reflow is a nightmare.
I personally think the DOM is a fine way to define an app structure. GUIs are after all containers and components which map nicely to nodes in a tree.
CSS is great for presentation (colors, font styles etc). One of its strengths is its simplicity and its cascading nature.
What we need is a sane constraints-based layout model. This is standard fare for native apps (eg: iOS autolayout).
Imagine being able to specify:
A complex layout can be defined in a handful of rules which even JS can solve for.Solvers for these types of optimization problems have been around for 20+ years. There's even a nice one written in JS eg: