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Comment by andrewjl88 | Hacker News Reader

Just because things sucked before HTML and CSS doesn't mean that they're the pinnacle. I personally find debugging HTML and CSS incredibly frustrating. Uneven standards implementation across browsers doesn't help either.

And I am seeing first hand how UI designers find CSS (it's NOT intuitive at all).

We build things with HTML, CSS, and JS that they were never designed to be building blocks to. At some point we either have to accept that these are not up to scratch or we can continue to see the web eroded in favor of native platforms (most of which are even more closed).

Attitudes like this makes this quote ring true: "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

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Let's not get all Gandhi here. You're not liberating a people from an oppressive colonial power. You are programming.

The newness of an idea does not indicate its objective "truth."

I'm saying that HTML and CSS can and should be brought "up to scratch."

I also disagree with your assertion that HTML, CSS, and JS somehow have some predefined subset of things that were intended to be built with them.

Actually I do find the DOM oppressive, especially at 4am in the morning before a deadline ;)

On a serious note, there is no historical precedent for standards committees to competently steer the technical underpinnings of a platform as dynamic and fast-changing as the web. Web development is unwieldy right now because of this.

I never asserted "that HTML, CSS, and JS somehow have some predefined subset of things that were intended to be built with them." At the end of the day, software performance is based on architecture. The architecture of a platform or a language or a framework is intertwined with it's intended purpose. Anything otherwise is just bad engineering.

HTML and CSS are reasonably well engineered tools. They just rely on the web from the 90's, a set of interconnected documents. Not the application and data driven web. The architecture is not designed to handle these new paradigms.

And JS? JS was designed to do form validation. Nowadays it can run your entire web stack, it was NEVER designed to do this. Can you build awesome web apps with HTML, CSS, and JS? You bet. But don't kid yourself that it's easy. Tools like Cappuccino, and Sproutcore, and Blossom are awesome and help sort of solve this issue but they do so at huge performance costs.

Someday the web will be written using the tools and frameworks that don't drive developers to frustration. How soon that day comes will have a lot to do with how attached we are to the outdated architectures used by the web today.

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