The problem is that, yes, this is the ideal, but when the ideal ran up against the real world usage of these tools, two things happened, one inevitable and the

The problem is that, yes, this is the ideal, but when the ideal ran up against the real world usage of these tools, two things happened, one inevitable and the other just a bad choice: 1) a small, extremely vocal group of devs kept reminding us this while the rest of us used the standards "wrong" and did fancy layouts and things, 2) seeing how most of the world used the tools we had, the standards folks didn't give us good layout tools or application development tools, they gave us CSS and it took browser vendors like Microsoft to give us XHR. Oh what I'd give for the standards folks to have taken some time to look at the world being built around them, and then given us a better way to do that, instead of "HTML shouldn't be used for layout" for years. I feel like, had things gone in a different direction, web development now would be as easy as VB/Delphi/Lazarus (hell, even tcl/tk) once made desktop app development. Instead, we get the soup of languages, build tools, and the confusing mess of modern web dev. Sigh.