Yes, it made me recall this, though I first saw it in FOSDEM '15 talks [1]. I thought it'd be nice to see what people think about this as I'm in the looks for a TeX alternative.
SILE indeed looks great, promising to come on par with the typesetting quality we have come to expect since TeX: Knuth-Plass line breaking, Unicode and OpenType font features support, complete with contextual shaping, Cassowary constraint solver, parallel text, multiple apparati, foot and marginal notes, vertical typesetting… This is a typographer’s dream!
But, like TeX and friends (LaTeX, ConTeXt, etc.), creating stylesheets and document templates still looks like a pain with SILE and alike. At least from the perspective of designers who have come to expect a strict separation of concerns between document structure/semantics and its styling, and who are used to work with a declarative stylesheet-based language like the prevalent CSS, as opposed to the macros of TeX, and its document model which conflates semantical markup with inline styling instructions.
Similar initiatives like SILE, which attempt to port TeX to newer languages while untangling macro spaghetti, like Cló¹ and Rinohtype², didn’t consider CSS-based stylesheets either. Which is a pity, especially with highly developed W3C Working Draft open standard specifications³ for paged media being out quite some time now.
That’s exactly what makes PDF formatters like Prince⁴, which accepts standard html and css as its input, so immensely attractive: users can continue to use the (Web) technologies they already know (html, javascript, css) and enjoy a strict separation of concerns between document contents, templates and make-up. Unfortunately, there exist no FLOSS alternatives.
Once in a while, people are coming up with the question whether there are TeX flavors which do support `.css` as an input.⁵ Peculiar too that no project exists to create a compiler to convert and map css style rules, selectors and properties to something which TeX does understand. (Except may this⁶ one.)
As a lazy Debian user, I checked all of these and found none on Debian repositories, which due to Ubuntu and other direct or indirect derivatives is probably the best way of making such software widely available and known.
