

Ask HN: what would your ideal language for web-pages look like? - snitko

Recently there's been a wide discussion on HN about using css vs tables and it seemed to me that a lot of people are unhappy about both ways and choose a lesser evil. Even further, maybe they are unhappy about the languages themselves, not just their elements.<p>I'd like to ask you, what would your perfect markup language (or languages, a replacement for css and html) look like? Just make it whatever you want: an XML sub-language or something completely different. Code examples would be appreciated.
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cx01
I'm not sure why your title says "markup language" but then you include CSS,
so I assume that you're talking about the combination markup+style. In this
case I would say: HTML is quite OK, but CSS is broken. I would add functions
and variables to CSS, so it allows you to write stuff like this:

    
    
      .someDiv 
      {
        width = $someOtherDiv.width - 150px;
      }
      
      .someOtherDiv
      {
        width = 450px;
        height = min(300px, $someDiv.height);
      }

~~~
jacquesm
spot on, some combination of javascript and css would be pretty neat. Isn't it
already possible to at least generate css from within JavaScript ?

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joshuarr
How about just adding height: 100% to CSS. Would that be so hard!?

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sam_in_nyc
I type in English what I want the page to look like, and it makes it look that
way.

~~~
snitko
I don't think you really want that.

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makecheck
I like "markup that doesn't look like markup", e.g. reStructuredText or
Textile.

