I remember in the late 90's when XML was hot stuff and there was of xsl and it's simpler cousin, xslt, and a capable mechanism for keeping everything "honest",

I remember in the late 90's when XML was hot stuff and there was of xsl and it's simpler cousin, xslt, and a capable mechanism for keeping everything "honest", the xml-schema. For whatever reasons, that never took off. It was promising, but it was mired in over-engineered complexity, the w3c docs looked like a nightmarish "design by committee" mess. I believe the intention was never to actually have to see XML let alone write it by hand. Along with the jetpacks of the year 2000, we were promised magical CASE tools that would handle the details. That fizzled out. Instead XML just became a means for encoding configuration that people typed in by hand, sometimes aided by a crappy intellisense-guided schema. We all grew to hate it. CSS was a great idea on the surface. Compact, not too complex looking: hook into elements by type, class or id, and style them as needed. But for many years it was a half-measure. Browsers behaved differently, and layout was counter-intuitive. And THAT is what I just can't understand. We had models for how layout on user interfaces should work for many years on desktop applications. CSS just didn't care, it was poor for newspaper-like layout and poor for web-app layout. CSS grid is such a refreshing step in the right direction, but why so long in coming?