@JaaggedSac
Uh? The future is headed towards making a "rich application" out of every web site?
Since when?
Of course HTML was not meant to "do" anything. It's only a markup language. The DOM on the other hand was born exactly to be accessed and manipulated. The fact that _any_ markup language can be parsed into a DOM is a general property.
HTML(+CSS) only deals with the layout of the _content_ that goes on your screen. It's the equivalent of the GDI libraries. And if something besides text, links, images are needed?
We could use a first class canvas tag and an XML-based vector graphics system, you know, like SVG that is supported by Firefox and WebKit browsers, but not by IE.
We might like to embed videos with a single tag instead of needing a whole Flash or Silverlight application. You know what "archaic" markup language has a tag? HTML 5. And guess which mainstream browsers support it yet - at least in their development branches - and committed to fully support it when the specs are final, and which one doesn't?
And I know how HTML and JS work, I've coded web applications since 2002.
Besides, you know what: with WPF ( codename Avalon ) it's Windows "rich applications" that are moving towards a declarative markup language based on a dynamic box-model layout, styled in a cascading manner, manipulated in a DOM fashion. You basically got it all backwards.
