I agree with you that CSS is weak, especially from today's POV, and that HTML & CSS can be unwieldy together. Also that "It's rarely possible to use some random

I agree with you that CSS is weak, especially from today's POV, and that HTML & CSS can be unwieldy together. Also that "It's rarely possible to use some random HTML and style it in an arbitrary way." However it's not true that "can't make a nice structure in HTML, and then style it with CSS." That is one of the design goals of CSS, and it works. In a former life I did this for many years, with many CMS and front-end systems. In a well-structured Drupal or Wordpress site, for instance, you can link to one additional stylesheet and override any aspect of the design. Some of the CSS might be ugly, and every now and then you might need the HTML tweaked to add a class, but it works. Check out [http://www.csszengarden.com http://www.csszengarden.com]. This is an old site, nearly 20 years old, put up by designer Dave Shea precisely to disprove your point :) It sports hundreds of interesting designs with non-trivial layouts, really pushing the boundaries of what was possible back in the day. All of the designs are CSS-only, and hang off the same HTML skeleton. If you view the source, it's pretty simple. Doing this with JavaScript introduces all sorts of other concerns: accessibility, security, privacy, maintainability, future-proofness, compute necessary to render, render time, etc. jQuery did basically this, right? Selecting markup and content with CSS syntax to munge them, or attach triggers. I rarely see people write vanilla CSS these days. Most folks abstract it with SCSS or LESS. That removes a lot of the warts. It's still too easy to end up with 5000 lines of CSS that can only be tested by manual inspection :/