Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS

In your latex equation, you are missing where the data goes. The idea for html/css/js is that data goes into the html, layout and styling into CDs and interactivity is defined in JavaScript.

That makes sense. The problem is that we never got anything close to that.

When do we get to throw the whole thing out and start again?

When something replaces HTML holistically and isn't locked into a single vendors solution. So, probably not ever.

Why do keywords have to end in a colon. couldn't the parser use space " " to detect the end of a word, like in C ..

The problem is it doesn't really make sense in 2015.

Or rather, it only makes sense if you accept the technical debt inherited from HTML, which is itself the simplified stepchild of SGML, which was a 1960s idea and firmly rooted in paper publishing.

Separating content and presentation isn't a bad idea. The badness happened because JavaScript - or some other web programming language - didn't appear until HTML was established. So instead of a generic object model, with tagged content containers linked to an updatable library of presentation and layout code that could be standardised and refined continuously, some semi-standard version of a sort-of-working layout library was pre-compiled into browsers and accessed through a not very coherent DSL.

This made it fast enough to be usable - a very good thing, given 1990s processing speeds - but it also made it much harder to develop and fix.

In 2015 CSS shouldn't really be necessary. So much layout and presentation is done with JavaScript anyway that it would make just as much sense to get rid of CSS and extend and standardise on something like jQuery-but-better to create an evolving cacheable layout library that bypasses browser quirks and uses exactly one common versioned codebase.

This might seem ambitious, but writing good code that works across all common browsers now is such a nightmare for everyone that too many devs are either not bothering, or their bosses are telling them not to bother because it's too expensive.

As a user, I keep finding sites that simply don't work in Chrome or Safari or IE or whatever. That's not good, especially when there's a business at the other end trying to sell things.

I don't doubt the web will creak along, and some people will do amazing things. But it's still frustrating when it could be simpler, more standardised, more consistent, and much more reliable.