Well for starters its open source instead of proprietary. I think that already deserves some respect on its own.

Then, this is based on doing websites in the web standards spirit of using plain-text files, where multiple components are linked together, and having the semantic content (XML) separated from the presentation (HSS).

I mean, we like the concept of HTML+CSS, but we would like to see many of its flaws and shortcomings corrected.