[jerf]

"Less executable code on the client, more powerful markup."

Well, since when it comes to layout, the union of everybody's desires appears to be simply Every Possible Thing, your more powerful markup is going to end up being executable code anyhow. If you specify a Turing-complete set of needs, you're going to need a Turing-complete language to satisfy them.

You can already see this happening even in CSS, and the more they try to pretend that CSS isn't code (even though it increasingly is), the more frustrating it's going to get for everyone when you end up with a bug in your CSS, which you are not allowed to fix due to the fact that we're all pretending it's not code.