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Comment by tannhaeuser | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I'd absolutely love to hear more about this if you've got something to share ...

To win a sizable portion of HNers, it suffices to say that DSSSL was the Scheme-based styling and transformation language of SGML (implemented by Jade/OpenJade). I can only imagine where we'd be now if DSSSL had won over CSS and similar FOSI-like ad-hoc styling languages (or even SGML's own LINK process declarations that however was kindof questioned by James Clark seeing the need for DSSSL). Personally I'm not into Lisp, but I'm very much missing the Lisp community's relentless search for ultimate simplicity, clarity, and expressiveness in the design of CSS.

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> I can only imagine where we'd be now if DSSSL had won over CSS

We probably wouldn't have dynamic HTML then.

DSSSL is basically the same idea as the XSLT/FO where document in semantic markup is transformed into a different purely presentational markup language (like PDF if it was SGML-based). It is a one-way operation on the whole document, and made totally sense for the intended use case which was to prepare document for print publishing.

I did a lot of XSLT at one point. I think if I still had to do it I'd need to be on medication.

Conceptually, I have no issue. Tree-to-tree transformations is a perfectly good concept and you use them a lot, especially if you do work that involves a lot of ASTs, for example. But the specifics matter, and XSLT was designed to be infuriating and punishing and the tools are terrible.

> I can only imagine where we'd be now if DSSSL had won over CSS

Or if Brendan Eich had prevailed when he wanted to embed Scheme in Netscape instead of Javascript.

He embedded Scheme in JavaScript instead but nobody noticed. As Lou Reed once said, “JavaScript is Lisp in drag”.

Except it isn't. JS has lexical closures, but that's not the only feature that makes Scheme what it is. JS got one thing right and about a dozen other things very badly wrong.

https://blog.kevinchisholm.com/javascript/javascript-wat/

Just to be clear, the Lou Reed quote was fake.

It is called The Little JavaScripter

https://www.crockford.com/little.html

Javascript is pretty much scheme or lisp.

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