Web Starter Kit

I would just suggest that it sounds like what Win7 does underneath the surface with the thousands of real-time Registry operations.

That sounds bad, but I'm sure it's chaos because the operations all grew by accretion, not by selection, as your suggestion to backport good web concepts indicates.

so.... What are the most likely candidates? What's ready? JSON? WebGL? A SQL interface to the Registry?

But I think overall, it's a good middle ground. There will never be a perfect solution in the real world (where resources are limited, and companies are motivated to lock-in).

Web is not a perfect medium, it has it's disadvantages. Web apps were definitely not in mind when developing and designing Web. But on other hand, it works and it's proven, it's been here for a while. There are solid technologies supporting it (nginx, apache, programming languages with their frameworks). Some say why not native? For the reasons we shifted away from native. Could we improve current situation with native applications? Maybe. But it requires a major player to get involved (read: money and skill). Would they be motivated in pursuing something philosophically right and all, while current technologies generate a lot of money? Doubt so.

Yes, HTML and CSS were not meant to be used for mobile apps, mimicking native appearance. As an alternative, we can stick to vendor, and learn vendor specific stuff which doesn't share much in common, not even programming languages. Meanwhile HTML/CSS is something much more developers are familiar. It allows more developers to develop iOS/Android apps. Maybe we should just make it DRYier like we were doing with so many problems? At first, grid frameworks came for CSS layout, then Bootstrap. And in future bootstrap-which-gives-native-iOS/Android look will come? There must be something like that already. We could throw it all away and create some new API (some suggest JS + WebGL). But again. It requires major effort, major resources and current technologies are money machines. So why to stop?

Not everything can be perfect and correct in real world, with real constraints. Some people prove that wrong from time to time. Will someone do this time?

As usually with interesting ideas someone beat you to it:

http://www.appcelerator.com/blog/2014/01/browser-based-emula...

Java seems to finally start to deliver on this promise though, the last few years have seen quite a bit of improvement. (Still far from perfect though, just the other day I was fighting some corporate website that insisted I install a certain version of Java in a certain browser in order to be allowed access, and it crashed in terrible ways when I finally did gain access).

Imagine that your browser simply wouldn't be allowed on the web until it conformed to a standard. Just like cars aren't allowed to go on the road if they do not conform.

This is unlikely to ever happen for various reasons and I don't think it would be a good thing but the number of broken implementations and hacks-that-became-standards is too large to even count by now.