You have basically described XSL FO. In retrospect that's obviously what we should have used for web page layout instead of HTML, but now it's too late.
http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/
> Unlike the case of HTML, element names in XML have no intrinsic presentation semantics. Absent a stylesheet, a processor could not possibly know how to render the content of an XML document other than as an undifferentiated string of characters. XSL provides a comprehensive model and a vocabulary for writing such stylesheets using XML syntax.
So the big issue with XSL is that it's verbose as hell. I remember using XSL Transforms to do some really simple things, and getting it right was horrible. Debugging it was worse. Given a piece of code that uses HTML + CSS vs XSL, I'd pick HTML + CSS any day simply because it's more readable.
However, yes the core of it seems much better thought out than CSS.
> but now it's too late.
Is it? Is it possible to have some XSL FO to HTML5 + CSS compiler?
> Unlike the case of HTML, element names in XML have no intrinsic presentation semantics. Absent a stylesheet, a processor could not possibly know how to render the content of an XML document other than as an undifferentiated string of characters. XSL provides a comprehensive model and a vocabulary for writing such stylesheets using XML syntax.
So the big issue with XSL is that it's verbose as hell. I remember using XSL Transforms to do some really simple things, and getting it right was horrible. Debugging it was worse. Given a piece of code that uses HTML + CSS vs XSL, I'd pick HTML + CSS any day simply because it's more readable.
However, yes the core of it seems much better thought out than CSS.
> but now it's too late.
Is it? Is it possible to have some XSL FO to HTML5 + CSS compiler?