But most apps are documents, they are built to render data and text fields in a nice way for the consumer to use.

You most certainly shouldn't be building graphs with table elements but JS has canvas and svg which make vectors pretty efficient to render.

The document model provides good accessibility and the ability for things like SEO and GEO to exist.

If you are making a racing simulator, then using HTML in no way makes sense, but for the apps that most of us use documents make sense.

It would be nice if browsers implemented a new interpreted statically typed language with direct canvas/viewport rendering that was more efficient than javascript, but chrome would need to adopt it, then developers would need to actually build things with it. It seems like it would currently have to come from within the chrome team directly and they are the only ones that can control something like this.

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hinkley 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The irony is that CSS works fairly okay for the small number of UI elements and web games that are decidedly not documents. Or perhaps that's not so much irony as filling in the gaps.

	▲	carshodev 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		fairy okay is the key word. Everything works fairly okay on modern hardware. I'm sure someone could build a 3d rendering engine using only table elements and css and it would run decently well. There are hundreds of tools in the belt, people can use any of them to tighten down the screw, but it doesn't mean that they are the most efficient or best to use. I would also say that a lot of web games are closer to documents than you think. A chess board could be seen as a document, it has tables and rows, the characters are just shaped different than the characters we write with. Something like a racing sim again could be implemented in css but someone who actually understands how to use canvas is going to have a more efficient way to represent it.