Hey, I am the founder of FifthTry.com and creator of the FTD document format. Backstory: I came across Matthew Griffith’s Style Elements library[1] years back

Hey, I am the founder of FifthTry.com and creator of the FTD document format. Backstory: I came across Matthew Griffith’s Style Elements library[1] years back, it made me rethink how to build and style user interface: thinking in terms of rows and columns was very intuitive to me compared to the CSS box/flex models. Style-Elements and then `elm-ui` offer a really small set of properties, and they are good enough for us to replace CSS for most part, this makes me think CSS is a bit over designed, or may be not designed at all, a hack gone too long. But CSS is not the only thing I struggle with, there is also the complexity of three completely different language you have to learn to build any simple user interface today, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You can do a lot with just HTML / CSS, especially if you are not building web-apps but web pages, but with just HTML / CSS its not possible to create re-usable components. And Javascript is just too much (so much so that a lot of backend developers declare themselves incapable of building basic web interfaces). Another problem that bugs me is the data representation / exchange languages: JSON/YML/CSV are too popular, and yet they leave a lot to desire, there is no way to define schema in any of them, writing them by hand is too cumbersome without programming editors, and then its just one more thing to learn on top of the three named above. It always bugged me that this can not be the best we can do. FTD is an attempt to take Griffith’s ideas, create a (hopefully) simple syntax, and create a unified language that replaces HTML/CSS/Javascript for user interface creation (think web pages, not web apps). A language that has first class data modelling capabilities[2]. I would love to hear your thoughts about it. PS: apologies for the back button bug, I have created a full stack web framework: Realm[3], and it’s under a lot of flux right now. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYb2GDWMIm0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYb2GDWMIm0 [2]: https://www.fifthtry.com/ftd/data-modelling/ https://www.fifthtry.com/ftd/data-modelling/ [3]: https://www.amitu.com/realm/ https://www.amitu.com/realm/