I think the problem is that the original technologies were bad to begin with. And the development was ad hoc and without foresight. Just look at the history of the img tag (http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html). DOM was tacked on later, JS was developed in a couple of weeks, with Java-like syntax just bolted on for marketing purposes. And CSS is the worst. Why anyone considers cascading to be a feature is beyond me. I mean, what were they thinking, what was going through the person's head when they decided "yep, cascading, that's what we need, forget name spacing, variables or expressions, we need cascading". Oh boy.