What is most interesting to me is that you don't see giant collections of tips on how to fix WinForms or Cocoa layout bugs. HTML/CSS/JS is a surprisingly powerful and flexible combo, but I think that experience has proven it to be, at best, a hard to learn layout tool.
I see all these efforts for CSS3 and HTML5 and I can't help but think that we are going in the wrong direction. We shouldn't be making HTML/CSS/JS more complex, we should be making browsers lower-level while still preserving the isolation and delivery attributes of current web development.
If Microsoft implemented Cocoa on Windows and Apple implemented WinForms on Macs, would you really think it would work 100% identical on both platforms?
The problems are not web technologies but them being implemented inconsistently across browsers and platforms.
I agree though that the load of new features of HTML5 will increase this implementation diversity.
I was speeking with respect to even any single implementation. Anchor/Dock layout, centering, z-sorting, evenly distributing space, relative sizing, these are all thugs that HTML & CSS make fundamentally harder than try need to be.
I see all these efforts for CSS3 and HTML5 and I can't help but think that we are going in the wrong direction. We shouldn't be making HTML/CSS/JS more complex, we should be making browsers lower-level while still preserving the isolation and delivery attributes of current web development.