You're grinding an axe that has little to do with what I said. Your defined split of "structure" and "presentation" is orthogonal to my choice of "layout" and

You're grinding an axe that has little to do with what I said. Your defined split of "structure" and "presentation" is orthogonal to my choice of "layout" and "content". Currently both HTML and CSS define layout and content. Layout being defined as the positioning and arrangement of panels within the viewport, and content being defined as the material displayed within those panels as the author intended. That emphasized part is important. The issue with styling in HTML had nothing to do with the use of tags and everything to do with the fact that they could not be classed. So the chosen tags had to be duplicated in entirety for every instance, which was a maintenance nightmare. Later versions of CSS saw it become more powerful than the original HTML tags. (Aside: This makes it ironic that it seems to be becoming idiomatic to inline styles for HTML templating. Templating solves code duplication, so it no longer requires classing.) But the HTML+CSS tools for layout are extremely primitive. There's lots of things to point at here. One simple one is that HTML often has superfluous structure that is required only for the CSS-defined layout to work. A more complex one is that it difficult for me to say I want the footer either at the bottom of the viewport or at the bottom of the content, whichever is lower.