> I wish for the day where I can really just write clean semantic html and then add the CSS afterwards on top of it.
What exactly is stopping you from doing just that today?
What exactly is stopping you from doing just that today?
So your document becomes a mix of semantic structure and then wrappers, containers, pushers, purely visual areas and so on. Also you're going to have things that are specifically redundant for your use-case, but you still add them for consistency and re-usability.
CSS would have to be quite a bit more powerful to achieve a clean separation of document structure and layout. It would need things like purely visual grouping mechanisms, reactive or backtracking selectors and HTML itself would probably need to be either a relational or graph structure instead of a tree to actually convey the semantics correctly and consistently.
E.g. let's say I have some html like <p class="warning">be very careful<p> and there is some 3rd party CSS that already has nice styling for a warning paragraph. But it uses .warn as a class, not .warning.
I don't want to change my HTML and I also don't want to copy the style. I want to tell CSS that my own .warning should inherit the style of .warn (and maybe adjust it slightly if necessary)
That is (to my knowledge) currently not possible.
.warn, warning
(you already kind of addressed all of that already in your "semi-relevant" disclaimer)
You make some good points, and I wish I could still edit it to "kind of possible" ;)