I was heavily critical of the author's original rant about CSS, and my citation of worse-is-better probably at least partially inspired him to write this post (

I was heavily critical of the author's original rant about CSS, and my citation of worse-is-better probably at least partially inspired him to write this post (http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-07-02/css-is-unnecessary#comment-1468335855 http://pchiusano.github.io/2014-07-02/css-is-unnecessary#com...). However he completely misunderstood my point to suggest that worst-is-better is a conscious design quality. In no way did I mean that, and I don't believe Richard Gabriel meant that either. Worse-is-better is about the reason certain solutions win in the market; it's about an evolutionary trait, not a design philosophy. Look at it this way. If there are 100 possible technical solutions to a given computing problem, the ones that solve the problem more comprehensively are naturally going to tend to be more complex, this complexity comes with an adoption cost, and that cost works against the likelihood of adoption. Furthermore, when you are talking about something that solves the scope of problems which CSS solves, there is no way you can just sit down and design a better system, it will need to go through many iterations to solve all the things that CSS solves (which no single human being is comprehensively aware of btw). In order to see that kind of investment a system needs buy-in from downstream users over long a period of time. So the strawman that the author sets up is the idea that someone is out there selling a worse solution on purpose because of this meme which is simply an observation of how technical adoption markets play out. Of course such foolish people may be out there, but no intelligent developer sets out to create something that is deliberately worse. Rather, each tradeoff is considered in its specific contemporary context of the imperfect information available. Whether a solution gains traction and wins in the marketplace is has nothing to do with the subjective qualities of "worse" or "better", but rather is a confluence of the state of the market at various points in time: how well it solves immediate problems, how well it works with existing tech, how easy to adopt, and of course some amount of hype loosely related to the aforementioned. What doesn't play a huge role is how ugly the evolution of this tech is going to look 20 years down the line when the entire landscape has evolved. It's a little tiresome when a young idealist comes into a 25-year-old field (I'm guessing the author is not much older than that himself), pisses on the hard work of thousands of people pushing web tech forward bit by bit over decades, and says it should be replaced wholesale because it's just rubbish, and then when someone tells them that you're welcome to try but you'll never get any traction in that Sisyphean task, he responds that people aren't engaging in a rational discussion.