Frontend (web) technology is immature and there is no solution.

Most new software interacts with people through a web interface: the frontend or client. The reason is simple: everybody already has a webbrowser. Any alternative has the disadvantage that it requires extra actions to use, and so excludes many potential users.

The frontend is typically composed of three interacting technologies: html, css and javascript. These technologies are well suited for their original intended purpose of displaying pages of text with some strictly circumscribed formatting. They are however in many ways too limited for their current more extensive use.

The limits of the frontend can be alleviated by the extensive use of javascript, which — as a programming language — can be made to exhibit a great amount of flexibility. Unfortunately javascript is often considered a poor programming language, as it violates the principe of least astonishment in various ways. As a result frontend development can be time-consuming, expensive, and prone to problems. Market forces align against a comprehensive solution, and so a plethora of bandaids to tackle this issue is continuing to evolve — mostly in the form of frameworks and higher-level languages that are transpiled into these base technologies. This in itself is a new problem as the landscape of these solutions is highly fragmented and unstable, so that existing solutions and skills depreciate quickly, and required investments are higher than they should be. Updates to the core technologies themselves typically do not solve the problem, as the user base tends to fracture around software versions, and software

Given that many software developers have acquired javascript skills — sometimes exclusively so — short-term economics have allowed and even pushed javascript to expand into server-space, where many alternative solutions exist that are in most ways superior to javascript.

A potential real solution would exist in embedding higher quality components by default in all the major webbrowsers. Due to strategic and competitive considerations this is unlikely to happen within a reasonable timeframe.