People often lament how DOM, HTML and CSS are becoming more and more complicated: the difficulty with simple and/or common tasks like vertical centering or virtualization, 600+ CSS properties, so many JavaScript methods, leaky abstractions, { contain: size }. I agree on many issues, but equally I struggle to imagine how it could realistically be
not complex.
If it was a result of a single very well thought through vision and developers were expected to be committed to conforming to the latest API (think Apple’s iOS runtime or the like), we could maybe expect the and tags, we could demand there to be The One Correct Way of doing anything, that the “fat” is trimmed quickly and features go from deprecated to gone in a year. However, it is a product designed by committee (in fact, by multitudes of various committees) that has largely maintained backwards compatibility for decades, it is a free runtime that grew organically from what was supposed to be a basic hyperlinked document layout engine but now powers fully dynamic applications rivaling their native equivalents yet still has a pretty low barrier to entry for new developers, and as such it’s remarkably robust.
Yes, some applications tend to have a large amount of markup for what seems like simple features (the Slack’s input box example). However, the alternative is that browser vendors bake it all in, and then every app is stuck with the opinionated way they think is right. Perhaps some amount of chaos is healthy.