I often think the existence of CSS can be seen as the strongest criticism of XML: when designing a language to store styling attributes for HTML, they used their own heirarchical format instead of another SGML-derivative.

I think you overestimate the amount of considered, thoughtful reflection that went into creating HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

And yet they have become useful far beyond their original intended design.

No. They have prevented aeons of progress. They are an unmitigated computing tire fire that future generations are going to curse us for.

Yeah, if just full-screen Java Applets had prevailed instead of web pages we would be much better off! Seriously, the html/css/js stack has its share of haphazard design, but it has shown to be much more robust and adaptable than any of the proposed "better-designed" alternatives.

Yeah I do wish I could see a bunch of unstyled, barely functional UX "designed" by engineers who have no understanding of interfaces or design.

Future generations? Current generations curse them right now :-).

Your hyperbole is truly as excellent as your dangling prepositions. I do so love the smartness with which you declare the end of society.

I and many other have careers because of them.

If it is such a problem for you, I would suggest coming up with actual solutions instead of the Grandpa Doom visionary "prediction" you've offered which is of no value.

Well, they've been used far beyond their original intended design, at least.

What exactly is not useful about using HTML and CSS to create web pages? The entire medium of the web to create applications is already far beyond the original intended design of the browser, etc. So what makes it so bad besides that some people, who seem to think they're pretty smart, have a lot of difficulty with it?

All of it? :)

It's neither a good rendering medium, nor a good language to describe the structure of the data.

Surely you must be joking about JS at least. The language was created in 10 days.

He writes "overestimate," not "underestimate" :)

Well CSS is older than XML. SGML was considered a (meta-)markup-language, i.e. a format for adding semantic info to human-readable text. It was never considered an universal data format. As an example DSSSL, the style sheet language of SGML, was not itself a SGML language, so it is clear the SGML community never considered SGML appropriate for all kinds of data. For that matter, DTD's are not in SGML language either.

XML was initially thought of as a simpler SGML, but when it took off it started to be used for all kinds of data including data which are not based on human-readable text at all. XML is fine for markup, but needlessly verbose and complex for non-markup languages.

I think you're mistaken about DTD, they were used in SGML. (As in XML they were optional.)

I was unclear. I meant DTD's are not an SGML language.

I think CSS is the strongest criticism of CSS.