Can an argument be bade that CSS only exists becuase javascript failed to develop a styling component to displace it?

I like to think webassembly is the right track. But ECMAScript and CSS alike need(ed) to devolve into a simpler byte-code like intermediary language syntax.

Browsers supporting complex languages has always been a bad idea, what they need to support is capabilities, and access and security primitives. wasm hasn't displaced javascript, because afaik, the wasm spec for browsers doesn't require them to implement javascript (and ideally, CSS) via wasm.

Instead of distilling, simplifying and speccing CSS and Javascript, browsers caked on layers upon layers of complicated features. The idea that browsers should define and regulate the languages developers use to write front-end code needs to die.

The complex parts of JavaScript are the semantics, not the syntax. You could reasonably easily spec a bytecode for JS to get rid of the syntax part, but nothing would change in the complexity (almost all modern engines parse to bytecode as the first step and operate on bytecode from then on).

If you wanted to implement JS in wasm, you'd either need a bunch of wasm extensions for JS semantics (dynamic object shape, prototypal inheritance, etc), or you'd need to implement them in wasm from scratch and basically ship a JS runtime written in wasm. Either that, or you need to change the language, which means de facto adding a new language since the old JS still has to stick around for old pages.

> CSS only exists becuase javascript failed to develop a styling component to displace it

there is no sortage of projects that do it (especially during the react era, people wanted to get rid of both html and css) but they get pushed down by dogma/inertia mostly. There was iOS constraint layout language ported to js. Seemed pretty cool, but the guy behind it decided to give up and everyone was like welp we tried, didn't work.