It’s good for users that HTML, CSS and JS are separate languages
Yes, but let&#x27;s not pretend the trifecta of HTML, CSS, JS is perfect either, or spin a genesis myth of order and purposeful design around it. In theory, JS is for interactivity, but in practice it&#x27;s used for compensating the many, many shortcomings of HTML. For example, reveal menus used by many modern sites can&#x27;t be implemented without JS (need to programmatically interrogate scroll position). Who&#x27;s to say digital text has to stick to a 80s concept of casual academic publishing? Or take lazy loading (needs intersection observer), when the basic concept of assembling larger docs from pieces&#x2F;text variables has been right there in SGML for over 30 years. The deal that made JS acceptable is that over time, as we learn more about digital text presentation, idioms pioneered using JS can be integrated&#x2F;consolidated into HTML. Yet HTML is essentially stuck in the 90s or 80s. While CSS has gone nuclear and gained an unhealthy amount of syntax and layout concepts to compensate for it. The result is a media format that is simply unusable for creating acceptable results by a layman, and also doesn&#x27;t capture essential structure of modern text (such as threads or bubbles of online discourse).<p>Not that self-declared web &quot;standardization bodies&quot; care; web vocabulary activity has essentially stopped in 2017 when W3C published the final HTML spec and cancelled the SVG2 WG, and Mozilla stopped investing into core web tech. The only new proposals since were for example Google&#x27;s &quot;portal&quot; element to aggregate third-party snippets.