| Personally the biggest conceptual problem with HTML/CSS is that it's incredibly unintuitive with mapping to real-world concepts, and not low-level (or straightforward) enough so that the low-level primitives are easy to manipulate. For example, WPF programs can have great accessibility - this comes from the fact that programmers can manipulate primitives which are semantically meaningful (buttons, lists etc). In HTML its just a sea of divs which lately have become an implementation detail to hang classes on to, and sometimes not even exposed directly to the developer, if you use a SPA framework. There's not a snowballs chance in hell you can build a quality accesibility solution on top of that. HTML's main idea was that HTML was a document model, that described the content in a semantically meaningful way, and CSS was the 'rest' which kind of allowed to make the whole thing pretty - the idea going as far as separating content from looks should allow people to 'theme' their websites and completely redefine layout. That idea has been completely abadoned. I'm not a frontend dev - although I can make a competent webpage by myself, I don't have deep insights into what's going on in the field - maybe Web Components will allow people to create semantically meaningful pages in a standard way? Maybe there should be another layer of abstraction on top of what we have - which is truly semantic, this time for real? |