I would argue that a good layout engine for pages could see good use. See Gemini/Gopher—people like minimalism, but having to use a separate browser makes it probably too niche.
Contrary to what was stated in the suggestion, it’s hardly a solved problem—improvements are being made at a steady pace (grids or { text-wrap: pretty } come to mind)—but it is interesting to imagine, especially if there were extra compelling reasons for engineers to restrict themselves to purer hypertext document API if possible (for example, it could be much more stable, while the app part could be unlocked to evolve more quickly but would be more demanding to developers keeping their webapps up-to-date; search engines could prioritize it; there could be hosting services specializing in it; and so on).
One counter-argument is that you can’t neatly separate the two and engineers will definitely want to use both; one way around it I can see is if hypertext document functionality was possible to use from within the webapp somehow, but I haven’t given it that much thought obviously.
Contrary to what was stated in the suggestion, it’s hardly a solved problem—improvements are being made at a steady pace (grids or { text-wrap: pretty } come to mind)—but it is interesting to imagine, especially if there were extra compelling reasons for engineers to restrict themselves to purer hypertext document API if possible (for example, it could be much more stable, while the app part could be unlocked to evolve more quickly but would be more demanding to developers keeping their webapps up-to-date; search engines could prioritize it; there could be hosting services specializing in it; and so on).
One counter-argument is that you can’t neatly separate the two and engineers will definitely want to use both; one way around it I can see is if hypertext document functionality was possible to use from within the webapp somehow, but I haven’t given it that much thought obviously.