I just shot beer through my nose LOL-ing when I read this.

Not a bad idea actually. I had used the lucid library to do just that. It was intuitive and easy to read.

Sample syntax:

    table_ (tr_ (td_ (p_ "Hello, World!")))

More complex:

    table_ [rows_ "2"]
           (tr_ (do td_ [class_ "top",colspan_ "2",style_ "color:red"]
                        (p_ "Hello, attributes!")
                    td_ "yay!"))

Source: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/lucid

Yeah Haskell is far from the worst langage to write a tree of elements in.

That is essentially what Elm proposes and it works fine.

HTML isn't a "tree of elements" though; it's about content token sequences described by regular languages where the symbols can also represent nested markup. The regular content model stuff is what drives SGML/HTML tag omission/inference and is a major feature of markup languages as a text format compared to primitive co-inductive expression syntax a la s-expr and co.

You can already write your Javascript in Scala so the game is afoot.