Is there a language that compiles to CSS but excludes the decades of cruft that have accumulated in CSS? Something that just exposes a few key primitives and jettisons the rest even if that means it doesn't handle some extreme edge cases?
Like what?
I assume there's some CSS that doesn't have a use anymore but thinking about layout, we don't need floats for page layout but that was basically a hack, float is still useful for its original purpose.
Basically, the CSS spec isn't full of cruft but there are a lot of CSS practices that are no longer needed.
CSS really does do pretty much everything you need these days.
For example:
.thing { topgap: 10 }
.other { topgap: 10 }
Would have to compile to different things if .thing was in a flexbox and .other was in a grid or a box. Since a lot of HTML is dynamically generated, we don't actually "know" this, and specifying which to use yourself ahead of time defeats the purpose, since you may as well just use the normal CSS properties. This could however work with completely static HTML. Maybe some JavaScript solution could hack on dynamic CSS but I would be sceptical of accessibility and performance in that case.
In the precompiled case, unless all the CSS was outputted using a very limited subset of CSS along with a large "base" CSS file, I don't quite know how it would work.
I hope somebody proves me wrong!
(I use this on my site. It’s suboptimal for build and could use a mountain of refactor. But the source is up on my GH if anyone’s curious)