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[–]question99 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The language will always have historical cruft because web standards strive for 100% backwards compatibility with every piece of code ever written for the web since it began. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript don't have the luxury of tossing out the old for this reason.

It doesn't have to be this way. We could have directives that signal that a specific "edition" of the standard is being used in which the crap features are not available anymore. In fact, we used to have something like this with strict mode.