More fundamentally speaking, I'm wondering what the intrinsic value of CSS is when you compare the work involved in building a UI in web-land and native-land.

More fundamentally speaking, I'm wondering what the intrinsic value of CSS is when you compare the work involved in building a UI in web-land and native-land. I remember once looking up on the proposed alternatives to CSS. One was basically a lisp, or at least the syntax, as far as I recall it. Think of what you could do with that! However the problem now is that the problem CSS intended to solve can only be considered in terms of CSS itself. I'm curious what other approaches could be taken if we worked entirely from a clean slate. Would it involve changing the DOM? Would it require a separate language? Who knows... CSS works great for websites but not so much for full-blown apps, where you're programming with a totally different mindset than what the web originally anticipated.