I think most of the complaints against CSS is because don't understand the problems CSS is trying to solve. It is not just a question of putting text and colors

I think most of the complaints against CSS is because don't understand the problems CSS is trying to solve. It is not just a question of putting text and colors on a screen. You can do that with Postscript or PDF or SVG or several other comparatively simple technologies. CSS is trying to tackle a much harder problem: - Layout and typography which can be readable on various devices with wildly different dimensions, aspect ratios and resolutions. - Incrementally rendered (i.e. the start of the document can be rendered before the whole document has been loaded) - Allow users to enlarge the text size while keeping the text legible. (In a PDF you can zoom, but then you will have to scroll vertically back and forth for each line.) - Backwards compatible with the display model of pre-CSS presentational HTML No other technology exist which solves all these problems. If you ignore one of more of the above constraints you can probably devise a simpler and more intuitive styling language.