There's 0 user agency to this scheme.
Developers (some) might enjoy this but this is bad for humankind. A garbage fire of Flash, forever & ever. Un-web. Having no high level interfaces to stand upon, using the web as a low level pixel-out target is the worst look a web company could propose, is deeply betraying to one of the only technological projects that has expanded human liberty. This is a horrible mis-step in the technosocial society.
And the intro sections attempt to malign seems intense weak sauce. "Quirky" feels like mostly works pretty great, for a huge huge number of the largest rank of developers- web developers. But oh no, visual centering is hard! Burn it down! Oh no there are some oddly named input gestures (which?), burn it down! Based off the proliferation of design systems (& having worked on a few), styling components is not on my list of complaints at all. I think many working developers handle what we have fine & are not nearly as restrained or encumbered as this slander puts-down.
This feels like an elite concern & self-justification that is unhinged from the real world. Where do developers sign up to say they dont have the awful terrible miserable forsaken life this post declares to be our conditions, needing total revolution?
The harm is just so great; blowing up our shared language to turn the web into a low level platform for pixels. This is the fall of information-society Babel, a fools quest, of ruin. Scattering us to many totally unique utterly unrelated development platforms, none of which have any power any web-extensions, any user scripting. This is a control technology, slams the door on the holistic better nature of the web, and that is an awful plight to perpetrate against the user, a sad & dark leaving of a bright information society to head into the Dark Forest of computing. What is the meat, what justifies this attempt to kill structured hypermedia & replace the world wide web with a web of bitmaps?
I just wish I saw any hope for an standard or interoperability, saw this as a starting point for better or more inter-networking of systems, which has been one of the most brilliant & faith-building-in-humanity things I've been so fortunate to experience the rise of, has been so inspirational. The web has been so obviously & clearly better than everything else in computing by being a medium, has so many virtues by being just self-modylifying documents. It has been stunningly inspirational.
By compare, this feels like walking into the dark. There is no medium of exchange here; just a screen with bitmaps. I want to have some at least vague sense that someone other than developers would be enhanced by a supplantative would-be-media like what is proposed here, want to imagine some real core connective substance that is at least as good as what we have.
I dont see any cognizance or respect from very good long standing web folk like yourself that this kind of effort has huge downsides and risk to users. Rather than everyone sharing a same web kernel, any developer can build their own app kernel & reinvent everything... it's bold & powerful an idea, and I struggle enormously to say (so very conservatively): no, this is a frontier we should not explore. I cherish exploration so much. But this doesnt seem like a medium to me, it doesnt seem like it's anything aside from giving everything we have & share up completely, to embrace a path of starting from nothing, and this time having no common interchange to work forward together with. Users having not a rich document, but just having a shitty low grade unintelligible illegible mess: having only running code. The idea of that, to me, resembles an attack, against the web, against the idea of inter-networking, and against people.
Hugs back Hixie, holy frelling frak!