We could have a better DOM too. It could be more semantic, and more modular. The good thing is that on this one we are moving in the right direction.
CSS would gain by becoming Turing complete. It also could be aware of runtime values.
But yes, JSON, YAML, and ProtoBuffers are all worsened versions of it. The good news is that we abandoned SOAP, but at the cost of abandoning service directories too.