Conal Elliott wrote:
I've been wondering for a while now what a well-designed alternative to CSS could be, where well-designed would mean consistent, composable, orthogonal, functional, based on an elegantly compelling semantic model (denotational).
Me too. I think there are several aspects 1. Layout description, i.e. sidebar `besides` (content `above` footer) 2. Visual properties, like red borders or blue backgrounds. 3. Applying the style sheet to the document, i.e. to the semantic markup. Current CSS is very weak at point 1, a clean box model in the spirit of TeX or Lout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout is preferable. Point 2 is solved fairly well by current CSS. Background and border colors are primitives, after all; so it boils down to a list of attributes. But a higher-order language is preferably as well, for example to capture common combinations in a variable instead of having to cascade it. Concerning point 3, CSS does ok for a hard-coded and specific output medium. Ideally, one and the same content could be visualized for different output media like web browsers (resizable), printer (PDF quality) or an overhead projector. I imagine some kind of macro language like LaTeX, Lout or XML "with macros"; but none of these examples are elegant enough for my taste. It should be possible to embed other languages for instance for mathematical formulas, highlighted source code, etc. I imagine that 3 is compiled to some kind of "CSS bytecode" consisting of 2 and 1. Regards, apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com