Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

In your example you say "Once in memory, this structure can be easily outputted as CSS." I think you may be underestimating how hard this will be. CSS may look like it's just a bunch of maps, but there is more to it than that. Consider something funky like:

  #id > p a.red:visited {
    background: url(foo.png) white;
    margin: 0 3px 5em 80% ! important;
  }
There's a lot going on here. CSS isn't just key/value maps.

Also, I don't think you want a data language to be Turing-complete. PostScript was Turing-complete but PDF is not; this makes PDF easier to deal with because it's easier to analyze and there's no risk of it getting into an infinite loop.



True, I'll confess I didn't know much about the more arcane CSS selectors when I wrote that (still don't). Complicated properties, though, are not too hard, and the important thing is that it starts off in a form that's easy to process.

I don't intend it to be just a data language. What I've been moving toward in my daydreams is a DAG of, for lack of a better word, function calls (some interesting data doesn't really fit in a tree), some of which are generators. If Turing-completeness is a problem in your context, you can reject some or all generators and/or just not evaluate them, i.e. take them as pure data. But I don't want to limit myself. I would have no problem if it turned into a general purpose language with a nice data-oriented subset.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: