Web development sucks precisely because we use a document markup language, a document styling language, and an interaction scripting language to build applications. It was bad enough when we just used this mess to make user interfaces.

If you've ever written or worked on a classical desktop application, you'll know what I mean. Since (at least) the 90s there have been visual UI builders and geometry management tools that allowed you to easily define a responsive user interface and connect widget events with calls to back end code. With the advent of CSS Grid and Flexbox, we finally have two decent geometry management tools--it only took 20 years. Except I can't use them yet, I have to support terrible old browsers (like IE7) that are embedded in customer applications.

We've been involved in reinventing a pretty, zero-config version of X-Windows, and we're only about 60% of the way done. How much further would we be if we didn't insist on building it in a hopped up word-processor?