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A comment on Languages Which Almost Became CSS. Parent comment

Re:Languages Which Almost Became CSS by pcwalton on Tuesday June 28, 2016 @03:25PM (#11996729)
CSS is only Turing-complete in pathological cases. Pathological cases do not make a good basis for policy decisions. In reality, the loss in performance from losing the style sharing cache alone would probably swamp any gains you'd get from DSSSL.
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Re:Languages Which Almost Became CSS by smitherfield on Wednesday June 29, 2016 @02:51PM (#12003757)
The point is virtual selectors and using Javascript for styling both have very poor performance characteristics, and both are A. ubiquitous and B. hacky kludges driven by the excessively limited nature of CSS as originally designed.

I'm probably out of my depth here, but what do you mean by the style sharing cache? I mean, any kind of file can be cached by the browser, including Javascript. And presumably browsers could've implemented optimizations (with or without the aid of hinting annotations) to identify those DSSSL functions that need only be evaluated once.

(BTW, like the author of the article seems to, I actually think that PSL looks like the best of the CSS alternatives he lists).

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