[RandyRanderson]

You're assuming HTML, CSS, etc are created/optimized for conveying information. They are in fact optimized to sell books, conference tickets and generation of page views. Iterating on versions, technologies, etc is a wonderful way to make money without ever exposing yourself to the cruel reality of solving problems. You have to hand it to them - a brilliant, if obvious strat.

I can imagine the conversation in some disused conference room going something like:

Organizer: Guys, I think the jig is up, we literally have ran out of new ways to layout a page. I think the string is run on this con.

New guy: Why not just repeat things like they do in fashion? Y'know like bell-bottoms.

Organizer: C'mon these lemming-like developers are not that idiotic.

Old guy: We can always go more dumb. tables v2 it is.

I've often wondered if one reproduced a sample of web pages in OpenGL/C, and compared the compressed source to the equivalent HTML/CSS/JS source, which would be larger?