Why is HTML so complicated?
aristus: HTML started out as a simple language for formatting research papers. It is a tree of text nodes and elements, ie section 1, table 3. It was not and is not intended to be a 2D anything.Over the last 20 years many people have layered on things for different reasons. The biggest, of course was the "style sheet" which came from the print world. Javascript poked its head in, which prompted an attempt to standardize the DOM without breaking backwards-compatibility. Then the Semantic folk tried to enforce a separation of "meaning" and "styling", which struggle continues to this day.