This is why I always liked Cocoa (macOS native UI toolkit) and still prefer it over web UI when writing native apps. It separates out the concepts of layout, appearance, and behavior, and lets you customize any one of them without needing to readjust the others. I just released an app this morning here that uses a non-trivial amount of Cocoa, and it would be full Cocoa if there was a Cocoa-version of the excellent Monaco editor. I feel like there should be a web version of this sort of "old-fashioned" toolkit that has a timeless ease of use once you get over the learning curve.
hakfoo|7 years ago
There were a lot of UI elements that were obviously needed if you were going to use a browser as an interactive app platform, but were easily passed over when minimal forms were considered sufficient.
I could see, for examples, a consistent WYSIWYG edit-box, a dropdown menu construct, a select-with-manual-override, consistent date and time widgets. Instead we got a bunch of inappropriate elements glued together with CSS and JavaScript to sort of work, but in unpredictable, non-native ways.