I agree, I feel like all the points both for and against SPAs and frontend frameworks in this thread are just circling around the idea that browsers make an awful platform for building software. But the delivery mechanism is so much more compelling than anything else available, and the momentum so great, that we're all willing to put up with it.
It will never happen, but I wish there was a second stack that browsers understood, totally separate from the DOM, purpose built for developing _applications_, rather than abusing the fact that this document creation tool allows us to put styled boxes in different places.
This is not really a failing of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, but if your platform SDK's total feature set for building UIs amounted to some basic form inputs, incredibly inflexible tables, and a handful of ways to add semantics to otherwise featureless blocks of text and boxes, you'd be laughed out of the room. The fact that anything remotely feature rich must be built from scratch is part of the reason the ecosystem has such a bad rap for over reliance on packages, and for constantly reinventing the wheel.
It will never happen, but I wish there was a second stack that browsers understood, totally separate from the DOM, purpose built for developing _applications_, rather than abusing the fact that this document creation tool allows us to put styled boxes in different places.
This is not really a failing of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, but if your platform SDK's total feature set for building UIs amounted to some basic form inputs, incredibly inflexible tables, and a handful of ways to add semantics to otherwise featureless blocks of text and boxes, you'd be laughed out of the room. The fact that anything remotely feature rich must be built from scratch is part of the reason the ecosystem has such a bad rap for over reliance on packages, and for constantly reinventing the wheel.