[jerf]

I'm not sure we don't just want to give up and go ahead and make it Turing Complete.

I am well aware of the arguments for DSLs being not Turing Complete and agree with them entirely and wholeheartedly. At the same time, I look at CSS and the strain of it "wanting" to be Turing Complete is becoming so, so noticeable, and what's worse than making a DSL unnecessarily Turing Complete is a DSL that wants to be Turing Complete, and instead of being carefully designed for that purpose gets it accidentally hacked in due to feature creep. (See also: SQL stored procedures, UNIX shell, make, XUL and a number of the declarative UIs that embed too much in the declaration that can't be easily worked with in code.)

Personally I'm coming around to the abstract "right answer" being to scrap CSS and just let JS do it all, letting some people put together some jQuery-like wrappers to make it easy and nice. I understand this will Never Happen (TM), but as CSS grows more and more "features" in the direction of TCness we're getting to the point where what we actually have is isomorphic to that, only much more complicated and impossible to work with.