Web UI "standards" are a friggen mess. We really need to rethink it all. For one, if we had a standard state-ful GUI markup language, we wouldn't need to reinvent so many common GUI widgets and idioms using bloated libraries based on JS + DOM.<p>Second, if web standards allowed true absolute positioning of vectors (as an option), then the layout engines could reside on servers, allowing us to choose a layout engine that best fits domain and need.<p>Note that while existing web standards do have some coordinate based features, they are too inconsistent to reply upon. If they were any good, we wouldn't need PDF viewers.