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HTML and CSS are the way they are because they, together, are markup for documents--and documents on the web are of indefinite shape. You can resize your browser window, or change your text-zoom, or insert/remove content in the DOM, and things have to reflow. Most importantly, this means that boxes containing reflowed text will get longer or shorter, and then push other boxes on the page up or down.

Because of this, it really makes no sense, in the context of an HTML document, to center something vertically--it'd just end up at some arbitrary position on top of some paragraph in the middle of the page's content, found after N/2 screens of scrolling. This is what separates an HTML document from, say, a PDF: PDF pages don't reflow, each one has a fixed height, so there is such thing as the "center" of a page on a PDF.

If the web were like PDFs, sure, it'd be easy to render it all using WebGL. But try imagining, now, writing an interactive text-layout-and-reflow engine in Javascript, to render web documents onto a WebGL canvas. How would you specify the constraints for that engine to follow? Some sort of declarative markup language based on a box model with paddings, borders, and margins, perhaps?

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Now, on the other hand, web applications tend not to care so much about the shape of any "document"--what they're interested in is the shape of the viewport. That has completely different semantics, and can be done easily in WebGL ("viewport" being a jargon term in GL.)

But... web applications tend to embed, and rely upon, the reflow semantics of web documents surprisingly often. As soon as you want to include any controls with user-contributed content, you need that rich-text layout engine, and you can't just pre-render it all to a canvas to bring it in, since users will want to copy and paste text from it...

So how come it's simple to horizontally center something.

If you read his post, basically width is the constant and height is the variable. That's why horizontal centering is easy, because the width is deterministic.

Not only is WebGL not declarative, but how do you handle rendering text and having the browser know that it's text?

While HTML/CSS has serious compatibility and expressive issues, it's moving in the right direction very quickly. WebGL will be fantastic for gaming and visualizations, I think it is very much inferior for web pages & applications.

> On WebGL, we can reinvent presentation and styling entirely without sacrificing performance. Maybe keep parts of HTML, and ditch CSS entirely in favour of something better, and use a JS lib to render it all on GLES hardware, the same in every browser

I'm not sure I follow you when you say "keep parts of HTML". Are you suggesting that we should have a canvas element that spans the entire region of the page, store the actual markup of the page hidden somewhere on the page, and then parse and render that markup to the canvas element using JS+WebGl+<some CSS alternative>? Or are you saying that the browser should simply give up on rendering HTML markup, and give it over to your JS App which will render it itself using WebGL?

> We now have many competing programming languages, competing frameworks, and so on, with a few mainstream ones and improvements/replacements all the time. Rendering entire websites in WebGL enables having the same world-wide innovation in presenting web sites and web apps to users.

If the rendering is done in user/app space, I find it hard to believe there would be any uniformity at all. Everyone would end up having their own unique dialect of HTML that behaved and displayed differently in their own customized WebGL based rendering engine.

EDIT: Disregard that last bit, I misread what you were saying to imply that it would be more uniform than what we have now.

Re: the example of centering a rectangle, and related problems, there is a CSS solution for this already, it's just not adopted widely enough yet: http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/

You don't have to throw out the whole shebang to fix that class of issues :)

When centering an element on a screen, ask yourself whether not it's necessary.

I would personally like to get rid of the presentation layer, not because I hate art(I do lots of web design and development) but because it's an enormous waste of time for the users, creators, and traffickers of those data.

I would prefer to read all blogs the same way I read IRC, email, XMPP, source code, logs... And I mostly achieve this, but addiction to the presentation layer on the web prevents me from having this typographic and stylistic consistency for blogs, news articles, and the whole shebang.

Before trying to convert the concept of modal dialogues and print ads to the web, ask yourself if this is what you really wanted.

On WebGL, we can reinvent presentation and styling entirely without sacrificing performance.

Doing layout and capturing input events on elements in Javascript instead of native code, without performance loss? Nah. Maybe you can do it in shaders, but that still sounds like the bad old days of flash, of binary blob websites without accessibility. I'd be glad to be proved wrong, but it just sounds horrible.

Oh, but WebGL games need good UI toolkits either way, so at worst, any such stuff would still be useful for that, even if not for general websites.

I'm not sure why you're saying that accountancy is for people with "no imagination" and, more worryingly, implying that it's some sort of "lesser" profession.

Maybe he speaks from his own experience? I'm not sure how limited mine is in this regard, but having worked in/with many companies and having met quite a bit accountants/accountancy related people, I can honestly say I have not met more boring, unimaginative people. People who enter numbers from invoices/receipts into software which does the actual lifting and, when done, sign it. The latter for liability because they have a certificate, being their only advantage. For them that is; why else pay them so much? I met 1 creative accountant/party animal in Spain who is now in jail for fraud. This is my own experience which is limited to only about 80 accountancy related people (I worked for a big French insurance company where actuaries created spreadsheets we implemented in code), so i'm not generalizing, just saying he might have the same experience.