Idk, on the one hand, HTML is what made the web great as an easy medium for self-publishing. This has now mostly been driven ad absurdum by CSS, the expectation

Idk, on the one hand, HTML is what made the web great as an easy medium for self-publishing. This has now mostly been driven ad absurdum by CSS, the expectations towards super-stylish content, and hence centralized platforms a la github, medium, etc. I mean I'm pretty ok at CSS, but the amount of hacks and stuff you have to do for even the most basic layouting and typographic stuff outside your regular markup is just mind-boggling, and not something you can call reasonable by any measure (including Flexbox and Grid and whatnot). OTOH, coming from print, there just was no blueprint for declarative, interactive, responsive web pages [1] so some concessions had to made wrt to evolution of the web. I always thought of JavaScript as a mid-term measure to try stuff until such a time when we could, from hindsight, integrate declarative UI features into HTML. But that hasn't happened, and HTML has essentially stagnated instead relative to JavaScript and CSS. What we have is this unholy HTML-CSS-JS trinity hardwired into people's heads with strong opinions on which goes where a la "semantic" markup, but absolutely no logical or scientific base for back up. It's all fun until you realize we're going to loose most digital content of our decade, and a once-strong medium for digital communication (markup, HTML) has been overtaken by corporate interests, nerds seeking an intellectual challenge because they can, feature creep and misuse of the web to counter a software crisis, self-sustaining web economies and generational churn, and other unintended consequences. [1] technically, there was SGML and HyTime, HyperCard, Xanadu