Comment by lincon127

I think the much more likely (and obvious) conclusion for CSS's complexity is a lot more benign, it's simply a patchwork language that has had too many cooks for far too long. You simply can't have different corporate interests working within the same project without it becoming a mess. However, even if there was just one guy working on it, you'd still run into the issue of complexity eventually due to the issue of CSS being extremely easy to implement. There's no versioning required anywhere, so how are you supposed to update old standards? At this point there's no way to refactor old stuff (and thus make it significantly less complicated) without completely breaking everything on the web.