You could and that's basically what TeX does, just without the CSS. There are even typesetting systems similar to (La)TeX, that can take XML as input, see Context [1] or Sile [2]. They’re just a step away from using HTML + CSS. Why isn’t there such system? I do not know.
It’s crazy, and that’s why hyphenation doesn’t really work that way. Both TeX and web browsers use Liang’s algorithm to split words. [1] It uses so-called patterns, which are short substrings of words in which numbers indicate how to divide the word. For example, the pattern “s1h” indicates that in the word “fishing”, a divider can be inserted between “s” and “h”. Patterns compete and can override each other, and the whole thing is quite complicated. As for your example with Qishan — the “s-h” probably overrides the “i-s” pattern.
(There have been a number of articles in TeX journals that explain the algorithm, such as [2].)
In CSS, automatic hyphenation must be explicitly turned on, see [3].
In TeX and in CSS, hyphenation points can be marked explicitly: in TeX with the \- macro and in CSS with the ­ or U+00AD character. In TeX you can also override the automatic division with \hyphenation{}.
The splitting algorithm in CSS is worse than the one in TeX, because it has to work in real time and because (good) splitting patterns are often missing.
> There is a problem because some licenses require attribution, but ignoring that...
Surely the solution would be to give credit to every author from the training corpus. I am looking forward to the 10 000 lines of copyrights in every header. :P
If Microsoft had trained it on its own code, there would be no such problems. Surely a company as large as Microsoft has produced enough code over the years to create a large enough training dataset.
There are cursive typefaces for the Latin script, e.g. [1]. There might even be some free ones. Making (good looking) fonts is hard work, but I don’t think making cursive fonts is that much harder.
[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20180429-155847_Fris... [2]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ausgewachsenes_Wilds...