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HTML & CSS.

To me they just feel wrong.

I have been working with them for a little over 20 years now, and it feels like very little has improved. Sure we learned to make things look a bit nicer, we got new tags and properties, but the syntax is still horrible.

The fact that both are replaced by other imperfect languages (haml, jade, less, sass, etc) is just a confirmation that their paradigms are about as fucked up and impossible to exterminate as cobol.

Which points at another problem: browsers, and how slow the web upgrade cycle is — adding native support for nested style definitions in css, or replacing html with a json document seems like a trivial problem, if it weren't for the dozens of browsers and the excruciating pace at which they can adopt standards.

Comments
  • 1
    CSS4 variables... I mean... They have some nice features but my god, why can't you have a usable syntax!?
  • 2
    I want <b> and <i> tags back. <em> and <strong> are so much less intuitive. Or at least change to <bold> and <italic>. I agree HTML feels hacky.
  • 2
    @chadd17 Over the years I've actually become less and less sure of this "separation of layout, style and behavior" paradigm.

    You see that all major frameworks on both front and backend try to hand you the tools to create "components", self contained bits of website which have everything they need packaged up in discrete units. But all of it is still built on top of a system which expects you to separate it out, and was not designed to handle imports/includes/templating at all.
  • 1
    @bittersweet layout and behavior don't exist very well independently. People seem to get around this either by project-specific hardcoding (frowned upon) or by using standard data formats and then 'converting' the layout (ex. Database Table -> JSON -> d3.js graph). I dislike how frameworks tend to knock this out of the park but make the rest of development overcomplicated.
  • 1
    We should create a new internet like Richard always dreamed of.
    With new browsers and new fancy technology and great compression!
  • 1
    @qbasic16 and security?
  • 0
    Security should not have to be mentioned, because I think this should be at the core of a new internet/browser concept ;)
  • 1
    @qbasic16 "should not have to be"...
    Murphy's Law
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