Recently I've been brushing up on web technology, and not just the new stuff like position-anchor, but old stuff that could have been the future but wasn't. Just now I taught myself XPath and document.evaluate() for basically no reason.
Did you know that browsers in 2026 still have strict XHTML parsers and error messages for application/xhtml+xml content? (I went and confirmed this with iframes and Blob URLs without needing to make an actual local HTTP server.)
I feel like HTML is such a goofy language that even this many years on, it's still hard to take it seriously. It's never going to have the straight-spined dignity of C or Java or Rust, or even the respectability of another layout language like LaTeX.
Saw a post observing that one of the most astonishing upsides of HTML, a document format, being repurposed as an application user interface framework, is simply that, unlike dedicated ground-up UI frameworks, font rendering actually works.