Completely agree. The fundamental problem is that HTML and CSS are the wrong tools for webapps. They are designed for documents. This is why all these CSS rules are so hard to use for applications. It is built on the model of a document, not a user interface.
The situation is immensely worse on machines like the Raspberry Pi or the BeagleBoard. People have drunk the HTML5 kool-aid and now want to run HTML5 on such machines. When you see how these boards choke when running stuff like an asteroids clone in Firefox or Chrome, you weep. Write the same thing in C++, or in something like XAML/XUL/QML/Enlightenment Edje, and it is super smooth.
My favourite would be something like QML, but with Lua instead of Javascript (but a Lua variant where the array indices start with 0, not with 1). Lua is much easier to accelerate properly, as LuaJIT has shown.
With Qt5, you write your interfaces (and optionally can even write all or most of your app) in QML. I tried it out, and it is such a breath of fresh air, compared to HTML/CSS. You can achieve the exact same thing with a small fraction of the resource consumption.
I find Qt5's QML to be a million times easier to use, read, debug, maintain. And that is because it is designed as a markup for applications. HTML was never designed for that. Neither was CSS. This is the reason for all this incredibly inefficient HTML webapp madness.
The situation is immensely worse on machines like the Raspberry Pi or the BeagleBoard. People have drunk the HTML5 kool-aid and now want to run HTML5 on such machines. When you see how these boards choke when running stuff like an asteroids clone in Firefox or Chrome, you weep. Write the same thing in C++, or in something like XAML/XUL/QML/Enlightenment Edje, and it is super smooth.
My favourite would be something like QML, but with Lua instead of Javascript (but a Lua variant where the array indices start with 0, not with 1). Lua is much easier to accelerate properly, as LuaJIT has shown.