Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

I will never understand the bizarre scene of the web's smug collective declaration that tables were dead and not to be used juxtaposed against the years it took to regain the ability to reliably center things. Assuming one agrees that we even did regain it. Related: I also love when I can't paste tabular data into Excel/etc. anymore For the record, I don't hate the idea of stylesheets, but...sheesh

I don't think things like syntax and schemes are the real bad parts. The real bad part is that CSS is in no way designed to be interacted with by anything but CSS. Just yesterday I was making a music player position bar, and using CSS transitions to have it smoothely update itself. Set the duration of the transition and it goes on. But what about when the transition takes effect? JS doesn't know when a style is actually updated…

This is a somewhat superficial list that omits discussing the fundamental idea behind CSS, viz. the semantic model; from which everything else is, directly or otherwise, a consequence. Two decades ago I was overjoyed to discover that Scheme was finally going to have a useful application beyond illustrating SICP and writing koans to amuse myself, because DSSSL was on the cusp of evolving into the last document styling language anyone would ever need. Unfortunately following an incident with a broken…

This doesn't even address the fundemantal design flaw with CSS: (paraphrased badly from a quote by Casey Muratori) Layout is about the relationship between TWO THINGS. If you have a layout language that deals with only one thing at a time, then you have failed.