It has only shifted the hacks out of sight into CSS/JS. Postulating "semantic" HTML and then invent a bunch of ad-hoc syntaxes (CSS) hasn't achieved anything in

It has only shifted the hacks out of sight into CSS/JS. Postulating "semantic" HTML and then invent a bunch of ad-hoc syntaxes (CSS) hasn't achieved anything in terms of expressibility really. The original purpose of markup attributes in SGML is precisely to represent presentation and other auxiliary properties in a uniform and manageable way. The concept of "semantic" HTML is, for me, just a rationalization of the HTML/CSS/JS trifecta after the fact. Instead of having presentation properties in HTML, now we have an incredibly complex rendering system that is almost infeasible to implement from scratch.