CSS sounds like the poster child of feature creep. It started as the right way of specifying styling (colors, fonts, line weights, spacing, etc) and now it's so extensive it looks like it's competing with OpenGL.
Most added features solve real problems.
It didn't, not really. We've bolted interactive UI on top, and it's held there by spit, out-of-date duct tape, and wasted lives
> Most added features solve real problems.
They are very ad-hoc post-factum solutions to a subset of real problems that solve those problems very poorly.
You can't escape the fact that the core of the system is made to display a single page of static text. To actually solve and evolve that you need to actually rethink things from scratch. That's why UI is slowly but surely escaping into Canvas and WebGL.
Oh, it's not even close to being the best thing we have.
What's the best thing we have then? Because I am not aware of any alternatives to CSS that I can use in the browser.
idk how you experience the last 20 years in the web without seeing a proof that we solved and evolved. the dom is in fact so successful and popular for ui that not only is it used for _more_ of what's on the web than it was 20 years ago, but that web ui's only "escape" has been onto the desktop, phones, tvs, embedded, etc
There are other consideration in technological spread that by far outweigh "being the pinnacle of technological achievement in its field".
I'm not sure this means what you think it means.
The DOM was standardized, and became ubiquitous. From thereon, people built upon that not because it was great but because it was all there was. JavaScript is also all there is and was, and everyone agrees that it is everything but great. Even the inception of nodejs and demo is due to the fact that the infrastructure was already there.
Being pervasive is not the same thing as being good or decent.
No, not really. HTML was from the start and always has been designed to specify UIs. From the very start HTML had support for specifying UI element trees, including higher-level UI design patterns like buttons, combo boxes, radio buttons, etc, and also supported running scripts as part of events triggered from those UI elements.
> Most added features solve real problems.
That's debatable, both with regards to "solve", "real", and "problems".
Of course it wasn't. These attempts to retcon hitory of the web are more and more prevalent these days.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented world wide web and the first versions of HTML for a very specific goal in mind: to share and link textual documents (specifically, research papers).
From the man himself:
"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities. The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
It was designed in order to make it possible to get at documentation and in order to be able to get people — students working with me, contributing to the project, for example — to be able to come in and link in their ideas, so that we wouldn’t lose it all if we didn’t debrief them before they left. Really, it was designed to be a collaborative workspace for people to design on a system together.
https://achievement.org/achiever/sir-timothy-berners-lee/#in... "
If you go past that scope, you need to completely redesign, or create two separate DSLs. Surely not taking a super small, specific, DSL like "what if we made redundant styles automatic by cascading them down the DOM tree?" and try to extend that for every conceivable styling, layout, rendering, and animation need.