[Devasta]

Software quality has never mattered in web development. When the W3C tried to push XHTML web devs balked at the idea that they should understand markup languages and not have syntax errors.

JS is installed on every machine, you don't need to deal with IT bureaucracy getting apps installed or heaven forbid ports opened, and it'll never ever have anything less than the full backing of the browser developers. Even Brainfuck would be the dominant language with that feature set.

So long as that remains the case, as it will in my lifetime, nothing will change.

[perilunar]

> When the W3C tried to push XHTML web devs balked at the idea that they should understand markup languages and not have syntax errors

At the time a lot of the people generating content for the web were not web developers, so HTML had to be forgiving. Most CMSes allow people to add arbitrary markup — it is far preferable for the browsers to be forgiving than to refuse to show pages if there is a syntax error.