CSS was never meant to be used for applications. What happened was this: Once upon a time, there was only HTML. It could only make simple text pages. Then th

CSS was never meant to be used for applications. What happened was this: Once upon a time, there was only HTML. It could only make simple text pages. Then the internet revolution of the 1990s happened, and everyone wanted to put make their webpage look like a glossy pamphlet. So along came extra HTML tags, and the widespread abuse of <TABLE> and other tags added to HTML to make web pages look like glossy pamphlets. At the same time, CSS was developed so the HTML could stay clean and maintainble, and the layout of the “glossy pamphlet” look was in a separate file. HTML + CSS wasn’t designed to make an interactive app. It was designed to make a magazine article or an online resume. One would use Java (1990s) or Flash (first 2000s decade) for anything interactive. It was in the 2010s, long after Java applets stopped being widely supported, and when Flash was too proprietary and too insecure, that the ability to make a fully interactive app was tacked on to Javascript; this was not the original intent of Javascript nor of CSS. So, there is no real underlying design. It was something hacked on to a standard designed to share text documents. If Steve Jobs were alive today, I think Apple or someone else would create a new interactive standard without all of the baggage of HTML + CSS + Javascript. It’s like the problem we have had for years, where a modern x86_64 chip is a 64-bit extension of a 32-bit extension of an originally 16-bit chip; it’s only now with the M1 that we are finally using a more elegant and well-designed chip architecture for desktop computers.