What Alternatives Are There To Using HTML/CSS Layouts For Websites?

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Learn more about Teams What alternatives are there to using HTML/CSS layouts for websites? [closed] Ask Question Asked 13 years, 9 months ago Modified 9 years, 4 months ago Viewed 23k times 25 Want to improve this post? Provide detailed answers to this question, including citations and an explanation of why your answer is correct. Answers without enough detail may be edited or deleted. It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. For help clarifying this question so that it can be reopened, visit the help center. Closed 11 years ago.

Is there any existing in-use, or even just conceptual attempts at creating a markup or programmatic expressions for designing the layouts of websites other than HTML/CSS?

If there are others out there and they do not appear to be in heavy use. Why is this?

• design
• web-development
• html
• css

Share Improve this question Follow edited Jul 5, 2015 at 20:24 gnat 20.9k2929 gold badges115115 silver badges293293 bronze badges asked Mar 1, 2011 at 20:09 IncognitoIncognito 3,48822 gold badges2727 silver badges3838 bronze badges 10

• 3 Are you asking for a non-HTML web browser? How would that work? – S.Lott Commented Mar 1, 2011 at 20:23
• @S.Lott I'm asking for an approach to put graphics on the screen that aren't heavily reliant on HTML/CSS. For example, Flash (as Martin answered) has been used widely to do this. In theory, we could do something with SVG, or have a middle layer (server or client side) that generates the HTML/CSS from a separate set of instructions (similar to galador's answer, but I believe HAML and SASS are for HTML templates and CSS, not entire websites in general). Etc. Perhaps a different MIME type that allows interactivity. Things that were just in theory, or things that are reality. – Incognito Commented Mar 1, 2011 at 20:37
• 1 "aren't heavily reliant on HTML/CSS"? Please update the question to specify what you're talking about. "alternative" and "not heavily reliant" seem like very different things. – S.Lott Commented Mar 2, 2011 at 0:08
• 1 @jhocking Why not ask it? Why bother thinking of other ways to do things when one exists? Once upon a time there were other proposals for style sheets and document formats. – Incognito Commented Jan 27, 2012 at 18:19
• 3 @jhocking It's practical (people have done prior work here), it's answerable(there's lots of answers already), and it's an actual problem I'm facing: alternative means to describe web documents than using HTML parsers and CSS layout engines. I want to find prior work before creating something else. – Incognito Commented Jan 27, 2012 at 18:59

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Moderator note: this is intended to be a canonical list; please check to see if your suggestion has already been added to the answer. If it hasn't, edit the answer to add yours preferably with an explanation or reason why you're suggesting it.

Possible alternatives:

• Adobe Flash (via Martin Beckett)
• AXR specification
• HAML (via galador)
• Java Applets
• JavaScript using the <canvas> element (via Czarek)
• PDF — Supports hyperlinks (via Peter Taylor)
• SASS (via galador)
• Sencha Ext JS 4 — has a number of good layout managers and containers, and the code to define those can be defined in a quite declarative manner similar to the JSON format (via herzmeister)
• Silverlight XAML (via Emmad Kareem)
• XSL/XSLT (via ben)
• SVG

Share Improve this answer Follow edited Apr 12, 2017 at 7:31 community wiki 7 revs, 4 users 56%user8 4

• 6 HAML and SASS compile down to HTML and CSS, so I'm not sure they're valid options here. – sevenseacat Commented Jan 28, 2012 at 13:21
• 1 The problem with most of those is the content is not discoverable by search engines. – Rob Commented Dec 2, 2012 at 13:50
• Should x-tags be in this list? – Florian Margaine Commented Dec 3, 2012 at 7:38
• There are html and css frameworks that are extremely relevant to this question even though they compile into html css, view: bem, oocss, mvcss, less, smacss, stylus – Sam Adams Commented Aug 8, 2014 at 6:43

Add a comment | 7

HAML and SASS are not alternatives to HTML. They are server-side languages that create HTML output. AXR is an alternative to HTML in the making. The AXR site says if you want to help out you can http://axr.vg. GRML is also an alternative to HTML, although I am not advocating to use it or not to use it. I am merely stating a fact. It hasn't been updated in 8 years and doesn't support any browsers but it's own. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/3486/An-alternative-to-HTML-and-current-web-browsers

Share Improve this answer Follow edited Dec 3, 2012 at 6:56 answered Dec 2, 2012 at 13:01 RyanRyan 7111 silver badge22 bronze badges 1

• axr is a dead link. – jiggunjer Commented Sep 5, 2017 at 6:13

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