Indeed. HTML was designed as simple vocabulary for casual hierarchically structured documents in academia with anchor links and, later, forms. Then it was used

Indeed. HTML was designed as simple vocabulary for casual hierarchically structured documents in academia with anchor links and, later, forms. Then it was used for all kinds of online documents and apps as they evolved. To say that the HTML vocabulary hasn't exactly kept pace is an understatement IMO. What has evolved is bolted-on tech such as CSS and JavaScript, and as soon as that happened, HTML evolution was kindof doomed because changes to HTML weren't essential (could be implemented in an ad-hoc way once a Turing-complete language was in the mix). Today, people praise CSS Flexbox and Grid, and they're no doubt a step-up from a practical PoV. But what has really just happened is that another ad-hoc syntax was introduced as a replacement for what previously went into HTML attributes, and worse, a syntax that needed to be able to roundtrip through HTML attributes via quoting and escaping. The notion of "semantic" markup and the HTML-CSS-JS trinity is really an after-the-fact rationalization of this syntax soup accident. From a comp.sci. PoV, there is no rationality and progress in piling up syntaxes over syntaxes with identical purposes, nor in equipping CSS with the power to rearrange element order, insert content, and whatnot, especially since HTML always had adequate typing based on a formal ISO standard (using SGML) whereas CSS lacks this completely.