Conal Elliott
[Spin-off from the haskell-cafe discussion on functional/denotational GUI toolkits]
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).
I think a very important thing to keep in mind while investigating web-technologies for pointers is that Haskell already comes with XML and XSLT (in the disguise of ADT's and functions), and that CSS is often abused for operations that are in the domain of XSLT. I don't believe that it's possible to draw a clear destinction between "concerns the programmer" and "concerns the designer". In fact, I get offended by the notion that I'm inherently incapable of distinguishing readable from unreadable text, and think that the notion of designers being unable to do anything but assembling a colourful collage of the data they're given is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy than a truth. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.