Jonathan Blow

I mean for the sake of the argument, lets forget about compatibility for a moment, say through some miracle this new browser just works, or at least with most modern pages. You still have to convince people to switch. "It's better" doesn't work, ask Mozilla.

Only if the switch is discontinuous. It is actually not that hard, given WASM etc, to envision a series of transformations that, for example, removes JS from the browser entirely. It only requires will.

Once you remove JS from the browser, now the Web is no longer based on an error-prone slow programming language, so it's a lot more natural for people to choose higher-quality languages (as opposed to hacks on top of JS like TypeScript).

Then once you have real programming languages, why do you have all this DOM stuff and wtf is CSS for anyway, just let peoples' code lay out the text, and get rid of all that junk.

There will of course be common libraries for doing this, so that people don't have to write it themselves. But the difference is, when it's just user-level code doing the layout, you have the power to change it. When it is built into the browser, you do not, and instead

have to engage in endless hacks that almost but don't quite solve the problem, like everyone does today.

Eh, that'd just make it harder to make apps and require more experience to make something good. I think it's too hard to make good apps as it is, even with a perfect understanding of the platform. I'd want it be easier to make good experiences.

Also the only good part (as far as I'm concerned) of DOM, is that it's a common vocabulary between a lot of people and therefore standards can be enforced and promoted. If everyone is flying a custom display tree impl. it'll be even harder to do stuff like screen readers, for ex.