Why it’s good for users that HTML, CSS and JS are separate languages

The interesting thing about the web is that you never know who you’re building stuff for exactly. Even if you keep statistics. There are so many different users consuming web content. They all have different devices, OSes, screen sizes, default languages, assistive technologies, user preferences… Because of this huge variety, having the structure of web pages (or apps) expressed in a language that is just for structure is essential.

It is truly incredible just how many kinds of users are out there consuming HTML. Especially when you start to consider things like search engine spiders and content scrapers, they enable some pretty incredible things (like, for example, democracy). These are all capabilities that, in essence, rely on semantic markup. And it’s not just HTML. It’s CSS too:

responsive design worked, because CSS allowed HTML to be device-agnostic.