[tannhaeuser]

Yes, and what's particularly irrational is that CSS found it necessary to invent a new key/value syntax. Then developers wanted to make sense of the mess by declaring "markup is for content, while CSS is for presentation". But the "separation of concerns" argument is merely an after-the-fact justification for the existence of the HTML/CSS separation. In the original markup language concept, attributes were specifically introduced to hold presentation attributes, while content was encoded as element content.

The content/presentation dichotomy doesn't hold water in a philosophical sense either. Many text pieces (such as poems, but also modern text forms) require special presentation. But what was particularly absurd is to invent a new syntax for key/values.