My point is that there's nothing in CSS that's exceedingly difficult to understand once you sit down to learn it - it's that you're often sitting down to learn things that are entirely idiosyncratic to CSS and act as impediments to creating anything beautiful. I could abandon CSS and use SVG to create prettier things pretty quickly, because although SVG has some gnarly parts, programmatically manipulated it makes much more sense. CSS is designed to solve different problems to the ones I often want to solve in isolation - i.e. it's document oriented as opposed to element oriented, if that makes sense. Then I'm dealing with the interaction of specific elements and document flow and everything is liable to fall apart the second some mismatch between my mental model of layouts and CSS's actual model occurs. At least it's getting better, as gradual as it is.

> Then I'm dealing with the interaction of specific elements and document flow and everything is liable to fall apart the second some mismatch between my mental model of layouts and CSS's actual model occurs

Here lies the problem. If you fix your mental model, then your layout won't fall apart.

It's the same as in any other language. Haskell doesn't match my mental model, but it's not the programming language's fault.

Haskell's problem is that it's so consistent (e.g. in enforcing purity, to the point of frustration for common tasks), if you don't understand it, you won't get anywhere. CSS's problem is rather the opposite - or if it's consistent it's consistent in its own, rather frustrating way. Mathematics may not be how we inherently reason, but I feel good having solved a problem in Haskell. I feel bad having solved most problems in CSS.

SVG is simpler than CSS because it doesn't tackle the inherently difficult problems of adapting typography and layout to a wide variety of devices and aspect ratios. It is simpler in the same way it is simpler to create a PDF than to create an adaptive layout.

SVG is just scalable vector graphics, like Postscript which is the basis of PDF.

Yeah, a lot of programmers don't care about making things "pretty". I greatly prefer simple, information dense, plain text websites for the most part.