Designers who think that CSS is in any way fine as it is are—and I say this as kindly as possible—simply so resigned to its limitations that they have unconsciously lowered their standards and expectations to meet what CSS actually makes possible. The range of selectors it provides is passable, but incomparably poorer than alternatives; the complete lack of variables and sophisticated constraints, to name a few. The ALM is a big step in fixing one of these inadequacies, but in my opinion it doesn’t go nearly far enough. I’m suggesting XSLT not as a difficult new technology for neophytes to master, but as just one part of a possible alternative.

to paraphrase myself from elsewhere, if people are still stressing about clearing floats in 2020, we really haven’t been working hard enough. My suggestion was thoroughly speculative; I’m wide open to better alternatives, just so long as the problems of today are actually fixed this decade instead of being swept under the rug.

Tim, do you have a URI for the RDF data? Tabulator is available as an Opera widget (but maybe we should upgrade our version), and it would be nice to see parsing all these things and how it works in the wild…