These two languages packed a punch and allowed for a great amount of good looking website to be created. There used to be a push for flash websites, but everyone noticed that they were too bulky and a lot of internets couldnt download them in a reasonable time. They ended up very clunky and many versions not supported by mobile, etc.
One great thing about flash was the flexibility it had, though. They looked great, and worked even better - due to having an ActionScript 2.0/3.0 environment. With plain HTML, I have to say its good if you just want to display something with elements going top to bottom, but I’d argue that BBCode, markup, etc would be better for that target - that is, if it actually replaced html, not translated to HTML. HTML is a nightmare when it comes to multiple columns of data to be displayed - which thats all that needs to happen anymore. The height is ignored due to the way its supposed to expand and everything is line oriented. I don’t think it needs to be line oriented.
HTML gets really neat when you start thinking about defining higher level things… like an integer that scrunches the body by constraining it to 800 pixels width, or a boolean, which would ignore the width/height of the scroll bar on center. But if you notice, this has nothing to do with the format of the code. It has to do with whats available, and how it is implemented. The above have hacky ways of implementation. The body tag gets its browser defaults wiped and margin is then set to [icode]margin: auto;[/icode] to be centered. Without creating html elements to get the size of the scroll bar, or detecting if there is a scroll bar, you would be left without a solution. It’s not a must to use jQuery. This is a very hacky way, and it should be changed but it hasn’t… strangely. This has been a many year old thing.
More on that, you have to do the above with CSS and JavaScript, actually manipulating elements on the get go. JavaScript uses DOM to manipulate the elements. While DOM is a smart idea, everything is implemented in a poor fashion. If I create an element I am reliant on using the id tag and there being a lose engine behind it. Why isn’t it so where you would just set the element to a variable and manipulate it accordingly? I am going to mention the API isn’t pretty for doing so… [icode]document.getElementById(“WhateverElement”).classList.add(“className”);[/icode] A single liner, too. Fortunately, you can set the element to a variable, which goes away very soon out of scope, even defining it globally. Its strange that you have to create variables with these elements after getting them from an unreliable resource, which is unreliable because it doesn’t guarantee that the element is there.
I want a total makeover, though. HTML is ugly to write in and prone to a lot of placement errors.
I kind of want to propose the idea that a header create the elements (think of C header), markup is completely removed, and the page is styled in a similar way to CSS, where you would group different changes. This area includes creating variable/handles to resources to be loaded. If it should be loaded dynamically, then the script engine should take care of that.
The header would handle parents and introduce the ability to create elements. An example of this would be creating two image boxes side by side, one spanning the length of the page. To the left there is an image, to the right - there is the box which could hold the title. It should lay out (java interface term) defaults for the page.
Instead of the element having being manipulated by ID or class lists using CSS, each element will have an empty table that will be added to where the key would be the element to change, and the value would be the thing to change. There is also, like I said before, have predefined lists which can be added onto eachother, like a matrix stack.
Playing off the header, comes the markup section… where there isn’t any markup. This is the place where the parents are defined and scripts which defines your environment. The script also gives life.
That being said, all of these stuffs are linked via the header and scripts are run first before elements are loaded. There is a good reason for this, and its to enable dynamically setting up the page on the client side. Then the page gets set up. Then the functionality scripts get executed. Then the media resources download and show.
What better to do this in than Java? Stating my issues is all I’m doing. I don’t think I will take on this 
I didn’t seen any serious code NOT using them since years, they just make layout/code a lot cleaner while not abstracting both too much.