Not really responding to the OP, per se, but had some thoughts motivated so I'll just jot them down: The issue isn't that there's a problem of content versus s

Not really responding to the OP, per se, but had some thoughts motivated so I'll just jot them down: The issue isn't that there's a problem of content versus styling; it's that there's no strict definition for structure. Instead, structure is conflated with content in HTML. You can't style something generically unless you have a content-agnostic structure to style. You can see this working in templating languages: we define views and have a bunch of sockets into which the content goes, and the styling just rides on top. I could see content that looks like this: <text for="login_link">Log in</text> And then something structural like this: <span id="login_link" /> Obviously, this is already possible using ERB or Handlebars or whatever, but if we're ignoring server-side processing the way the OP is (and JS's ability to manipulate DOM, for that matter), then I think this has a little merit.