If nobody "does it right", maybe right is just wrong?
It is certainly possible. However, what I have seen in the industry is that there are very few real CSS experts among people who are "busy working on actual software". Few people who have thought deeply about their methodology, the problems that it solves, and the problems that it introduces. And, on the contrary, there are too many people who either regard html/css as a playground for juniors, or are too happy to copy what other people are doing. In such context, it is very difficult to have a well-informed discussion about what is "right", and what is "wrong".
I will say HTML is flexible enough to be used for just about anything, but it certainly is better suited for text documents than web applications.
On a sidenote, do you know about HTMX? If so, what do you think about it?
HTMX is the same story—it's what HTML could be, but isn't, unless monkey-patched in userland.
For a while it was all left to appdevs to build a UI toolkit out of basic HTML but OpenUI really has been driving the standard forwards.
I'm not sure if I totally agree with this take, but if it's true that's a great reason to not build web applications. If the medium isn't right for the use case, why force it?
In my experience, application-specific features are really what made the modern web complex and bloated. Building applicstion frameworks and operating systems is insanely difficult, much more so than building a standard document format and rendering protocol.
Can the web be used for applications? Absolutely. But my argument would be that it almost never should be. Native applications will always handle that better, and though there isn't a great cross platform solution for applications today we'd be better off building that than shoehorning that usecase into the web.
Compare to the web: A single platform to build for. A single API to keep track of. A sandboxed runtime environment with zero dependencies, available on virtually every client system. A way to communicate with your servers that works, even in tightly guarded networks. A giant amount of documentation, available developers, and resources.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see native applications for everything. In the world we have, constraints prohibit that. So for better or worse, the web has to be mended into the universal application runtime environment we use it as.
After trying to make the most basic version of this app I can imagine, here's my takeaway on desktop application development: it sucks. Badly. Displaying a grid of images in a webapp is a few lines of javascript and a few lines of html. In most native application development systems I've seen, it's 20 lines of code just to open the window.
To be fair, the web makes easy things easy and hard things impossible, whereas native desktop applications make easy things hard and hard things possible. But, I definitely see now why most developers prefer to build things in electron.
If I need to do anything related to complex state changes, animations, page navigations, etc I'd also much rather use a native applications built with that scenario in mind. There are a ton of things we simply can't do with CSS - we're starting to see experimental features for simple page animations but they're very limited and manual. I worked on the Windows Phone UI framework back in the day, that was over a decade ago now and the kinds of navigation animations you could do with a few properties and flags was light years ahead of web page transitions today.
In what way do you mean this? HTML doesn't have the elements required for apps? Or declarative, XML-ish markup doesn't work well for apps?
I think that mostly shows in the awkwardness of transferring user interface widgets over. Stuff like popover, modals, combo boxes, toggles, drag and drop, sticky elements, etc. have either just recently become possible or require manual efforts to get right. And that, in my opinion, is an effect of shoehorning application primitives into a document environment.