hello PL people, have we try to design a presentation/styling language that's not basically CSS? I have just recreated CSS within my language and I'm not happy about it :(
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Oh, interesting! We () are quite interested in layout formalisms that could be used to make implementing styling languages easier. It would be neat if this could be used to implement CSS, and also experiment with new styling languages (eg. perhaps without the cascade?).
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my current concern is with writing deterministic easy-to-read styling code. I’m assuming that determinism may help with parallelism, but as I’m working with relative layout, that may make implementation even harder 🤷🏽♀️ (but it’s gonna be flexbox/grid based)
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Yeah, determinism can be hard in our case - where we are laying out stuff over multiple pages using CSS. Like, stuff later on can force us to change things earlier, and sometimes you just have to give up and do your best. Like footnotes for example. 😰
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One of the things we'd like to do is go back an have a look at Knuth's work on TeX - apparently there are things he was hoping others would build on, but still hasn't been fully looked into. I'm just relaying info here though - I'm not really with that original work. 🤷♂️
I will go have a look into that, but I’m guessing it’s more implementation oriented than a declarative, nicer way of doing that 😊
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Yeah, our hope is something like a 'calculus of layouts' that we can build other stuff on top of, using stuff we've learned in declarative programming that has been learned since Knuth was doing his stuff. Dunno how doable that is though, and this is all very early thoughts.
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