> less about the idea of using a full programming language for HTML styling And yet, here I am in 2021 writing an execjs wrapper to compile Tailwind via Sprock

> less about the idea of using a full programming language for HTML styling And yet, here I am in 2021 writing an execjs wrapper to compile Tailwind via Sprockets because of how much I've come to loathe Webpack. > more about just liking Lisp and wanting an application for it Well, yes, or rather more specifically Scheme, and I do believe that was my opening confession in the top level comment. > It is arguably inappropriate to require someone to "learn Lisp" in order to style HTML And it never should've been so, and it didn't need to be so with DSSSL either, because how much further might we have come in twenty years with an underlying language that wasn't basically hobbled out of the gate? Yet styling HTML with raw CSS is still programming, requiring knowledge of tree structures, a vast and ever-growing array of selectors and pseudo-classes and properties, recursion, priority ordering, an expression syntax not a million miles from S-expressions, the HTML DOM, four or five different box & layout models, and typography, not to mention all the browser quirks; oh, and - in practice, let's face it - Javascript; and yet 2 out of 3 major browsers still can't consistently size & center a top-level absolute block element, !important is the standard voodoo prayer for many, and fixing misbehaving CSS is basically debugging but in a language that lacks almost any first-class construct that might help. So after all this further reflection, and notwithstanding that I've built up tons of valuable-in-practice crystallized experience in bending CSS to my will, I'm even more irked about the way things turned out.