I developed many GUI applications for the Windows platform during my early professional career, and saw several GUI frameworks come, have whole magazines devoted to them, and then fade away. MFC is iconic.

Tasked with writing yet another GUI application, I starter researching cross-platform frameworks like Qt and WxWindows. I found the same steep learning curves I knew from before, and tooling doesn't help much in building a functional and elegant user interface because its clumsy and complicated.

But people are building beautiful and functional UIs on the Web all the time (look at this site!). The standards, the libraries, and the tools are certainly there.

My thought and my question: Why not write a GUI in which most of the UI is handled by an embedded browser? I already know that the Qt widgets support a large part of CSS and JavaScript, and programmers with good knowledge about web development are relatively easy to find, ..., so...

Have you done something like that before? What's your experience/advise?