They're embarrassing once you realize what's been done in the past, with incredibly smaller 'stacks' in much simpler systems, producing more powerful capabiliti

They're embarrassing once you realize what's been done in the past, with incredibly smaller 'stacks' in much simpler systems, producing more powerful capabilities. HTML and CSS require that a large amount of information be pre-shared and implemented by different systems (i.e. all browsers need to implement ginormous standard with all subtleties). After all that, you don't even get much interactivity, you need Javascript. A better design would be to share a tiny set of primitives that are designed to compose nicely and that can be used to build up much more powerful apps.