A Proposed New Language as an Alternative to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

#21

I absolutely loved reading this discourse.

The idea that we could somehow describe content differently is fascinating.

I had a long conversation about computers with my mother the other day. She is currently 70 years old and claims to have no understanding of computers or design patterns.

We took a piece of paper and wrote down some content. It was a few sentences and a few bullet points. I explained:

so - the computer just sees a string of characters. You know what the weight and level of importance of each of these pieces of content are - but the computer does not. How can we get some shared understanding going between you?

She was very frustrated but I just kept prompting her. I told her that the computer can read the letters - and that we can make some rules. After a few minutes - she was exasperated. She did not enjoy this challenge - and she just said:

Well… just put an x in front of it…

(meaning that the x would declare that the first sentence was of level 1 importance.)

I said that was a great idea… but what about the second sentence? She said - that it was just a paragraph - so, it could be the default. “The computer should be able to know if it doesn’t have an x… then it’s just a paragraph, right?” I said, sure. But what about that other heading. That looks like a section heading - that might be in an essay.

Well, just put 2 x’s for that. It can be the 2nd most important.

So, - in about 10 minutes - my mom had basically described her own frustrated version of markdown with x instead of #

I’m excited to think about other options to HTML / but I’m also not really sure how to even start.

There is some content. We ‘mark’ it - so - that we can reference it — and then we write(declare) a bunch of rules - and apply styles based on those markers… - and even my mom ends up with this same idea.

HTML(DOM), CSS, and OO programing styles - all just end up as groups of key:value pairs.

node-1
  content='Title thing'

.thing {
  color: red;
}

const thing =  {
  amount: 3,
};

Regarding this proposal - I’d love to see an example of another way we could describe content for the web. Are there any experiments or examples?

#22

This is a great idea. We do need a flexible way to present pages as an alternative to html and css. I’ve checked your post last year and now I’m coming back to see if there is any progress in the area. I believe that the new initiative of “WebAssembly” will solve this issue. WebAssembly will give us the flexibility to execute any code (kind of natively) on web browsers. that means someday we can design a page with Unity game engine without even converting it back to html,css, and JavaScript.