Yeah OK, I see what you mean, I may change my mind once I start using them. And having worked on interpreters and compilers, I can understand the need to keep internals simple and fast - like everything must be parsable in one pass - so the surface ugliness of syntax isn't as important in the long term.

Perhaps I should also be sympathetic to the spec authors, since they're working under tight constraints of language design. Things might look a lot more elegant if HTML/CSS/JS were designed from scratch as a coherent whole.