>> Honestly, the entire web stack isn't great: HTTP, HTML, CSS and JS were all designed in an era where websites were documents viewed on desktop computers, not

>> Honestly, the entire web stack isn't great: HTTP, HTML, CSS and JS were all designed in an era where websites were documents viewed on desktop computers, not responsive interactive apps that can replace everything from email to Photoshop. We've had and discarded, that already. Flash was a different platform, much more powerful, better UI, very good response times, and so on. It was supported in every browser. Building a Flash app was common, done a lot, and well paid. But there were unexpected consequences. Flash apps were not searchable, or deep-linkable. (It turns out, that's a big deal). Their UI was "fixed". You might not love CSS but it's amazing when it comes time to refresh the look of a site. Accessibility for less-than-perfect-ableness was non existent. HTML has accessibility front and centre. Screen Readers, zooming etc. Maintainence sucked. Change the source, recompile, redeploy. Whereas HTML, CSS and JavaScript are all source that can be edited on the fly, on the server. Sure, you're not doing that on big production servers, but for the long, long, tail of small sites, it makes maintainence a lot easier. Learning is harder. To learn Flash I have to learn Flash. To learn CSS,if I see something I like, I can inspect it to see how it's done. (Oh, line-spacing, good to know you, I like what I see you doing.) HTML is easier to scrape, and automate. That may be good, or bad depending on your perspective, but there's no shortage of "we integrate with x" (where x has no API) by "driving" the web site externally. So yeah, I can see the value in talking about JavaScript, but the benefits of HTML and CSS are well understood. We tried replacing them. It didn't go well. (I've avoided talking about the security nightmare that adding a Flash, ActiveX, Java Applet, caused. Or CPU usage. Those are issues with implementation, not the concept. But for those who weren't around, it ultimately killed all of them.)