Languages Which Almost Became CSS

Layout should have been constraint-oriented, not procedural. You should be able to express "Bottom of this box is adjacent to top of that box", and such. All those constraints go into a constraint engine, and a layout is generated. This is something a WYSIWYG editor can generate. To get a sense of how this could work, try sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor (there's a free 30 day demo) You can specify that a point must be coincident to an edge…

The trouble with allowing a procedural language for styling is that all you can do with it is run it. PostScript and PDF work that way, which is why doing anything other than printing those formats,is very tough. Copying text from PDF barely works. It's an output-only format. I wanted a constraint-type system. A is above B, B is to the left of C, D is below A and B. Something like that. All declarative, handled by a constraint solver…

I never understood the hatred for lisp’s use of parens. They effectively fade into the background in a relatively short period of time. Lack of syntax is a feature.