At least there was a distinction between web of documents (WWW) and shipped apps with custom canvas. Rendering apps with web’s DOM is stupid. It makes websites a mess and relies on everyone using the same monoculture of browsers (like we now have Chromium, WebKit and Gecko, all nearly identical).
If browser does not support one feature (like CSS’s transform), the whole house of cards breaks. It’s like making ASCII art in notepad and then expecting everyone to use the same notepad app with the same font and style, to not break our art proportions.
We need to split web into websites and webapps, with webapps being browser dependent or full custom canvases and websites being immutable human-readable and editable format.
Of course everything is standardized and we all love that. But building complex apps on top of this standard is temporary and defective unless all people are using same browser engine. That is because even if HTML, CSS and JS are always the same, details in implementation are not and it’s impossible to support all nuances. Good luck creating new browsers that can run Vue or React.
what are you talking about? modern web development is hardly a problem (because of the standardization). i am a front-end engineer, i deal with website development every day, and i can count with one hand the times i had browser-specific issues in the last 5 years.
you know the times that I had to deal with technology-specific issues? with 3rd party vendors for screen readers, which is not as standardized as the web.
the issues the web had in the past, where it was impossible to support all varieties were intentionally caused by Microsoft creating their own implementation of stuff for IE (sometimes because there was no standard yet; sometimes against the standard). there have been attempts from google more recently to add extra incompatibility (like making Google Drive offline only work for chrome), but nothing as bad as what Microsoft used to do.
what does that mean? vue and react are just libraries, as long as you implement all the required features, they will work. it would be a ton of work, which is why there are only 2 (3 if you consider webkit and chromium different engines) implementations