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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

Reasons:

- Browsers don't "talk" any other language but JS

- All browser APIs are exposed through JS only

- You can't manipulate DOM except through JS

- You can't do "fancy web flourish" without manipulating DOM. If you target Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU, you'd have to first create your entire graphics lib + flourish + font handling and rendering + accessibility + ... from scratch. And load all that on every page load

- Any language compiling into WASM would still need JS-integration for any of the above. Including Canvas/WebGL/WebGPU

- Any language without JS and DOM semantics will need to account for that (e.g. GC on DOM nodes)

- Any language compiling to WASM would need to load its runtime to actually run (including any libs). See network tab for any such project. e.g. Blazor

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> - Browsers don't "talk" any other language but JS

I'm not looking for browsers to talk with any language. I'm looking for some DSL that directly maps to the 3 layout languages that browsers understand (i.e. HTML + CSS + SVG). Not anything turing complete at runtime but rather a sane way of describing a webpage layout with fancy styling, UI elements, transitions, and animations but without dealing with the pain that comes with actually writing in the native browser layout languages.

> You can't do "fancy web flourish" without manipulating DOM.

There is a lot of web flourish you can do without manipulating the DOM. It's not actually terribly unperformant to do but writing that code (mostly HTML + CSS, occasionally SVG) feels like peeling your eyelids with an unwashed lemon zester.

> ...

And for the rest of that, again I'm not looking for anything that actually executes in the browser. Just a sane, modern layout language that compiles down to static HTML and CSS with no JS or WASM (unless you explicitly ask for it).

The web spec is so complex because it serves different masters. You either making a web page, a web app, or some hybrid of the two. And there’s different constraints for each. And you will have to choose which subset to target if you were the one building that modern language.

Yep. Again, I'm not looking for a perfect global solution.

Just some domain specific language for writing sane low-to-no-js web pages or parts of web pages without having to manually fiddle with HTML or CSS in any real amount.

Static site generators honestly get me a lot of the way there but those are unfortunately template based which means any significant customisation requires dealing with the HTML and CSS rather than being able to just describe the layout and behavior I want.

Honestly I'd just write the compiler/lang myself if I didn't hate frontend so much.

> Just a sane, modern layout language that compiles down to static HTML and CSS with no JS or WASM (unless you explicitly ask for it).

Depends on what you mean by sane modern layout :)

Many modern layouts are still impossible without a lot of JS intervention. Many web flourishes also require Javascript :)

That's why there are no DSLs for this: HTML and CSS already are the DSLs you're looking for.

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