> I sure hope it's not a "few years" though before css-in-js solutions become best practices.
On the contrary, I think CSS-in-JS is quite short-lived. A temporary patch before Web Components become widespread.
> Keep the old APIs, but build a "virtual DOM abstraction" that completely skips the DOM. No more DOM.
The DOM won't go away, there are 25 years of backwards compatibility to support.
And the concept of Virtual DOM isn't the "ultimate thing" of web development. It's not terribly efficient either. The real game changer is the stateful UI.
> It's still predicated on the fact that the DOM and its dom/paint/layout engine is there. We need a whole other engine.
There already is one: it's WebGL. Hard to develop with it? Well sure.
But given that engines improved *a lot* in the past years, why do you *need* all that speed for?
It's worth mentioning that they're not called padLeft and padRight because that would be confusing for strings written from right to left (there's an Unicode code point that marks the text direction, U+200F).