[DawnFalcon]

Because it strongly affects ongoing maintenance and usability. In this day and age, anything not using XML needs a darn good excuse (And CSS in particular dosn't have one!). Why should I be locked into TeX parsers rather than XML ones?

(And sure, you can convert. But conversion tends to be a lossy process, and one which needs direct script editing to fix...)

There are only a very few, very poor WYSIWYG editors for web pages as a direct result of the current implementation of CSS, and HTML5 looks to make the problem considerably worse, not better, by upping the complexity without addressing the usability issues.

WYSIWYM is based on a fundamentally different philosophy to WYSIWYG (not "quasi" anything), and there's a good reason it's not used by mass market programs! Yes, software needs to be smarter to come up with sane solutions within a WYSIWYG GUI, but it's been managed in most fields: There should be a web editor sitting alongside Word and alongside Writer. (Sure, they can save-as HTML themselves. The results are very crude...)

Again, there's not a generally applicable, easy-to-use web editor precisely because of the particular way CSS+HTML is structured. The lack of such carries the argument, unless and until one exists: professional web designers script directly, and they've structured the web's architecture around their desires (I'll admit mostly unintentionally, but it's a positive feedback cycle because they're the people with the most time to dedicate to it) and needs.

As one example - because of the non-compliant CSS implementations of every major browser, a WYSIWYG editor can either only create a page which looks good in a given rendering engine, or it needs to support multiple rendering engines (Not impossibly, but a pain in the ass) and be able to handle the gross changes between them automagically so far as is possible, which dramatically adds to the complexity of the task.

And CSS 5 support looks to be even more fragmented than support than 2.1!

(Oh, and my interface with these forums is a greasemonkey-modified Firefox interface which works quite differently from the standard view, but it's going well beyond CSS changes...most people find it confusing, but the author and several other people such as myself like it. Now if he can actually get round to replacing a certain lump of code and making it freely distributable...)