Except this barrier has never existed. Every HTML input is interactive: text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons. They not only remember their value, but your cursor position within them and the segment of text you've highlighted. The browser knows how far each scrollable element is scrolled, which element is in focus as you tab through the page. Forms have validation state, and can be interacted with to send an HTTP request. These days you can even do autocomplete with nothing but HTML: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da...
The magic of HTML has never been about static layout, but about having a declarative language for building out an interface (not just a static view, but an interface). This idea that it should be nothing but a dumb view-layer is a new one, popularized by the very frameworks you're railing against. Data binding is a way to stay in that declarative space, while dramatically expanding what use-cases can be covered within it. JavaScript (in the browser) was, and always should have remained, a trapdoor for working around HTML's shortcomings. It's a Turing-complete language for doing things that can't be done any other way. Anything that can be neatly siphoned off from that more complex imperative world, should be. For the sake of complexity, for the sake of accessibility, for the sake of performance, and for the sake of compatibility.
I built lots of HTML form UIs in the early 2000s. They were garbage. Many modern web UIs are on par with native apps, so much so that folks are now using web technologies to build actual native apps.
With 150 years of evolution (at current W3C standards pace) you might get an HTML spec that is capable of expressing the behavior that users expect from present-day applications. Until then we have React et al.
Form/<input> fields are one of the areas that a native app can slaughter HTML, even if using a WebView within an app. For example, just showing the correct keyboard layout is a nightmare, and heaven help you if you need to do something slightly custom. Another example: browsers do funky shit with scrolling and zooming on input focus. Try using the best HTML code-editor from a tablet: the editing experience sucks.
Another example is swiping, where browsers like Safari Mobile (and the old Edge) decide to navigate back/forward if the user happens to swipe from the edge by mistake - killing page state. Overriding pinch-zoom for say a photo app is doable, but sometimes ends up with invalid UI states (especially if you mix in viewport sizing changes due to orientation/ua-zoom/virtual keyboard show/tab bar show).
Disclaimer: I have spent many man-months working only on making user friendly custom <input>s in HTML, and the experience blows chunks. I have developed a custom Web UI that required too many compromises in UX.
How many native applications are written in electron? It’s a lot. VS Code is electron and replaced my usage of actual visual studio. I still have it installed, I just don’t use it anymore.
> Anything that can be neatly siphoned off from that more complex imperative world, should be.
No it really shouldn't. Just look at JS. It's a complete mess. And HTML would get there in a short time if they were to adopt "anything that can be neatly siphoned". The problem is that data binding is actually quite complex. I have seen data binding done 10 different ways in different languages and they all had their flaws. It will be very difficult indeed to come up with such a standard that is actually being used universally.
If it is not, what sense does it make to add it to the standard? But for it to be used a lot, it would actually need to solve most problems in most businesses for the forseeable future.
Given the fact that the Web apparently still hasn't figured out quite how UI development is supposed to work (judging by the 1 new language feature, 10 new frameworks, 100 new libraries developed each day), it will be a very poor idea to start baking half baked stuff into a standard.
Except this barrier has never existed. Every HTML input is interactive: text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons. They not only remember their value, but your cursor position within them and the segment of text you've highlighted. The browser knows how far each scrollable element is scrolled, which element is in focus as you tab through the page. Forms have validation state, and can be interacted with to send an HTTP request. These days you can even do autocomplete with nothing but HTML: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/da...
The magic of HTML has never been about static layout, but about having a declarative language for building out an interface (not just a static view, but an interface). This idea that it should be nothing but a dumb view-layer is a new one, popularized by the very frameworks you're railing against. Data binding is a way to stay in that declarative space, while dramatically expanding what use-cases can be covered within it. JavaScript (in the browser) was, and always should have remained, a trapdoor for working around HTML's shortcomings. It's a Turing-complete language for doing things that can't be done any other way. Anything that can be neatly siphoned off from that more complex imperative world, should be. For the sake of complexity, for the sake of accessibility, for the sake of performance, and for the sake of compatibility.