What's the right way? The appealing thing about HTML is that it's actually rather simple, and it works extremely well for most tasks. Some of the styling rules

What's the right way? The appealing thing about HTML is that it's actually rather simple, and it works extremely well for most tasks. Some of the styling rules in CSS are a bit arcane and difficult to master, but in general the CSS box model still feels a lot more simpler than the TeX box model, or the layout model used in many UI toolkits. You want a markup language that satisfies a few simple properties. It should be text-centric, to make it easily searchable, indexable, and accessible. It needs to be easy to write by hand, since people want to be able to write simple pages quickly without using heavy graphical tools. And it needs to be relatively simple to programatically generate, since programatically generated pages are an important part of the web (i.e. pretty much every non-static website). If you think about it, HTML satisfies these requirements fairly well. The fact that some kinds of complex markup are difficult isn't really important enough to counteract the fact that it's structurally simple and really amenable to programmatic manipulation.