How else would things go when people use a tool for which it was not designed to do? It's an evolutionary thing. A need is identified, a feature addressing the

How else would things go when people use a tool for which it was not designed to do? It's an evolutionary thing. A need is identified, a feature addressing the need is proposed. Then new needs are identified, new features are proposed. The problem wasn't in the tool, the problem was the tragic slowness in the browser vendors implementing the features into the actual browsers. Don't forget that for many of those 20 years we had competing standards of different browsers doing their own thing. If the vendor didn't like a proposed feature of CSS, it didn't get implemented. I wouldn't blame CSS for that. Every complaint that I see about lack of features of CSS or how long it took for the features we do have to get implemented I blame the browser vendors.