Ok I have to disagree here. I believe the failure of XHTML was to cram everything into XML; I found XForms especially pointless. Now don't get me wrong, and as you know from my other posts here I'm as much of a markup geek as can be, but IMO markup is first and foremost for representing and authoring text. Just that browser content is mostly text, however, doesn't mean everything has to be markup. To the contrary, I believe XHTML (and XML in mainstream apps) fell out of favor because the spec authors tried to anchor each and everything on XML, rather than on something that makes sense for the task at hand (a phenomenon not unheard of for JSON and YAML as well). In XForms, for example, XML was used as a programming language which just never made sense. You know you're doing it wrong IMHO when you have to discuss whether you want to store your data in attributes or element content, a distinction that only makes sense for text data.
It's sad and surprising how much time and energy was wasted on XHTML. Back in february I met Steven Pemberton (XHTML spec lead back then, and of ABC/Python fame). He's just such an inspiring guy to talk to, but unfortunately, there was no time for recapitulating the XHTML situation.
> And were we are, yet to have a Web UI designer that can match Blend, Qt Creator, Netbeans Matisse, Scene Builder, Glade, Delphi, C++ Builder,....
Huh, my experience was all those things are terrible (spent some time with Qt and researching Glade, also inherited a Delphi codebase full of spaghetti code at one point).
Visual UI tools are great for prototyping, awful for maintainable code. Anyone I know who's spent any time with them ends up wanting to go back to the code.
There certainly are good Web UI designers [1], it just seems no-one wants them. There are successful visual Web UI prototyping tools tho.
Those tools are wonderful and make my life on native frontend projects enjoyable, versus the pain having to deal with of Web design, which I happen to have experience since the early days (first coded web apps were C based cgis in 1997).
Trying to manually hack GUI generated code is an anti-pattern.
One has to leave the code generated by the tools to the tools, everything else should live in other code files.
Sadly I never heard of Macaw, specially on the enterprise circles I move on, in any case they seem to be gone now.
https://www.w3.org/standards/xml/components
Basically Events, Modularization, Fragments, XForms, XQuery and possibly other parts that were still being worked on when the HTML 5 hype started.
And were we are, yet to have a Web UI designer that can match Blend, Qt Creator, Netbeans Matisse, Scene Builder, Glade, Delphi, C++ Builder,....
When I do web development I always feel like I am stuck with something not better than Notepad for GUI programming.