It’s funny realizing how unintelligble and badly written a late-night tract when one is quoted and forced to re-read it the next day. 😉 In any case, I cleaned up one particularly unintelligble passage, so hopefully it makes a bit more sense.
Some addendums: “creativity” can also be hard when the grammar is arcane and the production tools immature or non-existant. I don’t think anyone would argue that TeX would be much more widely used if it were more accessible (despite it’s power), or that visual artists only really started proliferating with say, pixel pushing when relatively usable graphical tools became available.
Lastly I wonder if part of the reason that CSS, at least on a visual level isn’t really designed to do much more than the technology it is replacing? People who want pixel perfect control, motion graphics, etc. are already using Flash, people who want full backwards compatibility and standard layouts are using graphics and deprecated HTML? On the other hand, the really cool stuff, like advanced DOM and other styling features are for the most part not very well defined/implemented. CSS3 and DOM L3 are both in draft format, and no browsers really support even the DOM L2 and CSS2 comprehensively. Lastly, I want to emphasize some of the ridiculous design choices made (ie, how current the box-model specifications append padding and margins to the width (very inconvenient for using %’s) as well as the relative complexity of doing simple things like vertical aligns (and we’re not even talking about to the document, but just to the viewport), [oh, and how about namespaces? grr.]. If you do searches on these things, you’ll find all kinds of similar business. I suspect that many people view CSS as a rather retarded and slightly useless standard, written by a committee of academics and monied interests who had no intention of eating their own dogfood (say like MS, which participates in the standards process and goes of on it’s own [although admittedly, some of it’s CSS interpretations, while being incorrect when compared to the standards, seem to make more sense, and it’s DOM collections and addressing methods are much more convenient in real world usage].