>HTML & CSS seem a world apart from traditional programming (and computer science, etc.) and were initially much more about things that were the designer's real

>HTML & CSS seem a world apart from traditional programming (and computer science, etc.) and were initially much more about things that were the designer's realm--another tool for layout, format, hierarchy, etc. This was the problem. HTML was for a very specific idea about design and page layout but designers wanted more options then the primitives provided by HTML. So to fix they created CSS. Then started endlessly tacking things onto CSS until it's the mess that it is today. A well designed API happens in layers. You have pixel primitives at the bottom layer and then progressing higher and higher to textual and graphic design primitives at a top most layer. What we have in the front end world today is HTML at the bottom layer and pixels inside the canvas layer. The whole thing is duck taped together in ways that don't make sense.