I think the #1 issue with HTML (and CSS) is that it is portrayed as being trivial, easy, "not a programming language". Someone who has written a few `<td>` "kno

I think the #1 issue with HTML (and CSS) is that it is portrayed as being trivial, easy, "not a programming language". Someone who has written a few `<td>` "knows HTML". It's not respected. Consequently, people don't invest time in learning to use it well and keeping up with new features. And then they use it poorly, or run into awful examples of it, and come to the wrong conclusions about it. While the idea of a markup/styling language is pretty simple, HTML+CSS deal heavily with difficult concepts like ontologies, cascading and non-imperative behavior, balancing UX & machine interpretability (accessibility), etc. Add in HTTP and browser APIs. Web dev is distributed computing par excellence, and is extraordinary deep and challenging, yet it's also viewed as among the lowest forms of programming. That's a big mismatch.