You look at the web today and you see a great amount of HTML and CSS splattered all over the place. We have tutorials and hacks to make things look nice cross-browser, but no matter what you do it's always really hard to create nice compatible things in a scalable way. Many people like web-frontend development compared to desktop gui because of the very fact that you can pretty much go insane and create whatever you want without being stuck with toolkits and widgets.

In an environment where your site has to look consistent, buttons, toolbars, popup boxes, you will be working on creating that HTML/CSS snippet of code and then use it wherever you need. I recently did some studies on how the best desktop gui frameworks out there worked (Cocoa ex), and I've been trying to thinker a nice way to port that same scalable system to the web.

SVG isn't currently supported by all browsers, so that was out of my list, then I thought about "absolutely positioned divs" which eventually came to be the right choice. Javascript speaks to the DOM, but with this technique we never need to talk to it, we only need to write to it - manipulating top-left-width-height of each element will give you a beautiful structure of nested divs in a way that you wont need to worry about HTML/CSS anymore! Considering how nicely javascript is already connected to the DOM it wont be hard creating your own framework to make Panels, Buttons etc..(hint - inherit the DOMDivElement).

Of course the people at 280slides.com and qooxdoo have been doing it for a while, but I really cant see many other folks doing it.