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> It's a mystery why we didn't simply reuse XPath for selectors... it's all in there!!

It's not really a mystery:

> CSS was first proposed by Håkon Wium Lie on 10 October 1994. [...] discussions on public mailing lists and inside World Wide Web Consortium resulted in the first W3C CSS Recommendation (CSS1) being released in 1996

> XPath 1.0 was published in 1999

CSS2 was released before XPath 1.0.

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Fair enough. By the way, the original CSS from 1996 featured only:

- the "descendant" combinator (whitespace) - the "class" selector (".foo")

The 1998 CSS2 introduced "child", "following sibling", and attribute selectors. This state of things then remained unchanged forever (I see that Selectors Level 3 became a recommendation only in 2018?).

On the other hand, in 1999, XPath already specified all those basic ways to navigate the DOM, and CSS still doesn't have them all as of 2025.

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