This is nearly the opposite of what I would want from HTML or the web.
A fixed layout is not going to work for all devices.
Such a choice is tantamount to deciding that some classes of devices are not going to be supported, which may be a reasonable choice but better to make good choices in the HTML and CSS and let the devices try to make something usable of it rather than giving them a fixed window into a layout intended for another.
> A fixed layout is not going to work for all devices.
Designers are also making their choice with HTML nowadays : Desktop is not supported anymore. Look e.g. at twitter, a billion dollars company switching to mobile web only. Flash could easily implement media queries to re-layout itself.
Just by the padding in the buttons it's obvious that twitter's current site was built for mobile. Sure, it's responsive, and i bet flash could become responsive if it was still alive. HTML games however are also non-responsive most of the time just due to the nature of their use case.
They might have meant mobile-first and not mobile only. Their desktop site is very clearly designed for mobile, the main content does not change at varying screen widths. The sidebar and header do a bit of restyling, but thats about it.
Flash could be used for responsive layouts. They were actually far easier to design in Flash than in HTML/CSS. No floating, flexing, grids, nesting HTML elements. You just set the objects x and y axis in Flash to the bottom center or wherever you wanted the object to remain, and you were done.
The layout engine in flash was REALLY well thought out, and allowed for simple constraints that would allow for things to grow or shrink based on screen size. You could anchor buttons and they would move properly, all without having to worry about things breaking across browsers.
If someone would re-implement just this feature along from flash i would be REALLY excited to use it!
So far i dont think there is really much in the way of "constraint based" layout engines that are easy to use for the web is there?
Almost all GUI toolkits work that way, except HTML, because HTML is not designed for GUIs.
For instance look at AnchorPane in JavaFX. You can lock things to the edges or offsets from the edges. You can nest layout managers if you want something different like a table or HTML style wrapping text flow.
In the end HTML is just being abused. It was never designed to be a Flash replacement. If the web was a more pluggable platform Flash would still be alive and kicking for sure, the creation tool itself was lightyears ahead of anything HTML ever had, but the browser makers have killed it pretty ruthlessly. Looks like groupthink to me, tbh.
Re: "A fixed layout is not going to work for all devices."
Agreed, but not all apps need watch-to-wall scaling. All our internal "productivity" apps run on desktops and nobody has complained. Certain check-status-of-project kinds of apps may be something people want on mobile, but not heavy data chomping/sifting.
Different things need different tools and standards. Even web apps don't really work right on mobile unless you test and adjust for mobile. Using Twitter Bootstrap etc. does not guarantee an app is usable on mobile.
And sometimes it seems it would be easier to make two different apps for different devices rather than one-size-fits-all, as it's nearly impossible to optimize the UI to automatically adjust to both using Bootstrap etc. Workable on both, maybe. Optimized for both, no. There may be handful of people in the world who can pull that off, but you won't find them.
A fixed layout is not going to work for all devices.
Such a choice is tantamount to deciding that some classes of devices are not going to be supported, which may be a reasonable choice but better to make good choices in the HTML and CSS and let the devices try to make something usable of it rather than giving them a fixed window into a layout intended for another.