Well, it's a Lisp. Complaining about the syntax tends to suggest less about the Lisp than about the person complaining, viz. that they have not learned Lisp, or that they have and did not enjoy the experience.

By the same token, if we go searching for code in a 20-years-dead language and make wisecracks comparing some random sample, to something that's had many years of development since; irrespective of whether it is representative (and it isn't, particularly), this still doesn't say much about what might've been. As a more equal basis of comparison, I remember working with the CSS and HTML of twenty years ago, and this was invariably excruciating. The CSS we work with today is the result of two decades of polishing, and it's still mediocre, inconsistently implemented, and still riddled with issues and oh-for-heavens-sake-why-can't-it-just-do-X moments.

Back to the point, however; the canonical DSSSL application was DocBook, and we can still visit the much more lovely DSSSL source at its resting place in https://github.com/docbook/dsssl.

It's not so much the syntax as that I have never once thought that I wanted an imperative stateful language with variables and loops (!) for applying styles to the DOM, instead of a declarative one. And it seems like a disastrous idea to me.

And I haven't been thinking this for 20 years or something set in my ways, I was previously only vaguely aware of this "controversy". In fact, while you suggest the unfamiliarity or dislike of Lisp syntax is behind opposition, I think it's probably the reverse, most of the people (especially in 2020) pining over DSSSL are specifically those in love with Lisp who were hoping it would make it an again mainstream technology -- I'm going to reverse it and say your advocacy is less about the idea of using a full programming language for HTML styling and more about just liking Lisp and wanting an application for it.

But also, sure, syntax matters for technology accessibility. It is arguably inappropriate to require someone to "learn Lisp" in order to style HTML.

(I did learn and enjoy Scheme in undergrad CS curriculum long ago, I admittedly haven't used it since).

> less about the idea of using a full programming language for HTML styling

And yet, here I am in 2021 writing an execjs wrapper to compile Tailwind via Sprockets because of how much I've come to loathe Webpack.

> more about just liking Lisp and wanting an application for it

Well, yes, or rather more specifically Scheme, and I do believe that was my opening confession in the top level comment.

> It is arguably inappropriate to require someone to "learn Lisp" in order to style HTML

And it never should've been so, and it didn't need to be so with DSSSL either, because how much further might we have come in twenty years with an underlying language that wasn't basically hobbled out of the gate? Yet styling HTML with raw CSS is still programming, requiring knowledge of tree structures, a vast and ever-growing array of selectors and pseudo-classes and properties, recursion, priority ordering, an expression syntax not a million miles from S-expressions, the HTML DOM, four or five different box & layout models, and typography, not to mention all the browser quirks; oh, and - in practice, let's face it - Javascript; and yet 2 out of 3 major browsers still can't consistently size & center a top-level absolute block element, !important is the standard voodoo prayer for many, and fixing misbehaving CSS is basically debugging but in a language that lacks almost any first-class construct that might help.

So after all this further reflection, and notwithstanding that I've built up tons of valuable-in-practice crystallized experience in bending CSS to my will, I'm even more irked about the way things turned out.

> It is arguably inappropriate to require someone to "learn Lisp" in order to style HTML.

It's entirely appropriate to require people to learn something new, like a Lisp-based template language instead of HTML, if you're paying them to do a job.

Requiring people to learn stuff for a job is one way that shit languages proliferate; why deny that advantage to others?

It seems like similar to folks wanting something like XSL (or is it XSLT?) for certain uses, but CSS seems fine for just styling.

There's XSL:FO which allows you to transform XML into PDF documents, and you would not want to be writing that every time you wanted to add some basic styling to a webpage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects