Funny, have a friend that does desktop dev because he "hates web dev", built his own UI building framework on top of Swing :
menu.addChild(item)
...
An alternative would be to use a more powerful language that would let you express the kinds of things you often need with CSS as macros and have no CSS at all.
The problem is that you want to organize the content of the document (HTML+DOM) with annotations and whatnot, and then style it to look pretty or position it just-so (CSS), and then finally maybe add some goofy runtime logic or updating (Javascript).
We've got tools that have evolved already to solve these three problems, so why not use them? One of the happiest days in my life was getting to do UI development on the web instead of an AWT/SWT/Swing behemoth (CAD software in Java) or really clean but subgreat visualization/menu framework (C with OpenGL, C++ with rendering interface, various other toolkits over time).
Because they are not powerful enough.
...can you show us an alternative?
It's fascinating anyone starts using smartphones.