The traditional view is that HTML is a messy presentational format with lots of repeated boilerplate and lots of subtle gotchas in the syntax. In that view, it

The traditional view is that HTML is a messy presentational format with lots of repeated boilerplate and lots of subtle gotchas in the syntax. In that view, it makes sense to separate HTML from the logic into templates, where the markup is basically handled as opaque strings by the template engine. However, with semantic markup, each HTML element actually have a functional significance. The HTML is now the model, not the view. This does not solve the labor division problem you describe, rater it turns it into a completely different problem. Now HTML is basically the domain of the programmers, and CSS (and perhaps some amount of XSLT) is the domain of the web designer. It it still not clear to me how these should work together.