It requires a lot… but a lot less than JS. The awkward declarative nature of it is a side effect of wanting it to parseable at speed.

At an initial look I agree with you that the functions look very awkward. But I thought the same about CSS variables until I started using them and now I think they’re great so I’ll keep an open mind. I almost wonder if they would have been better off calling them “templates”, or something. “Functions” is going to make people think it’s just like JS.

Yeah OK, I see what you mean, I may change my mind once I start using them. And having worked on interpreters and compilers, I can understand the need to keep internals simple and fast - like everything must be parsable in one pass - so the surface ugliness of syntax isn't as important in the long term.

Perhaps I should also be sympathetic to the spec authors, since they're working under tight constraints of language design. Things might look a lot more elegant if HTML/CSS/JS were designed from scratch as a coherent whole.

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