[Haskell-cafe] Elegant & powerful replacement for CSS

[Thomas Davie]

On 3 Feb 2009, at 20:39, Conal Elliott wrote:

> [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).

Can I start by replacing html please :)

I'd like to separate the document in roughly the same way as html and  
css attempt to, meaning I'd like a document description language, and  
a styling description language.

I can imagine the styling language having the meaning "function from  
documents onto geometry", but the document description language is  
harder.  Ideally what I'd like to do with it is to make it describe  
*only* the logical structure of the information being conveyed –  
sections, text, figures, tables (no, not for layout, for tabular data)  
etc.  I can't though come up with a nice simple solution to that that  
(a) restricts users to really describing documents, not layout (b)  
still allows for composability in any sensible kind of way.

Bob