If the designers of Unix had seen the light of CSS, they wouldn’t have bothered with shells and file descriptors and C and Awk and all that composable flotsam.
They’d just created a single program, call it the “Central Software System”, and defined thousands of properties that let you control its state machine to produce the output you need.
Presto! The perfect computer. If for some reason someone needs a new kind of output, it can be added to the Central Software System via a friendly decade-long committee process.
And if the properties happen to conflict in how they define some output, well, the one company in the world who has actually implemented all of this “open standard” can decide what happens in that case.
They’d just created a single program, call it the “Central Software System”, and defined thousands of properties that let you control its state machine to produce the output you need.
Presto! The perfect computer. If for some reason someone needs a new kind of output, it can be added to the Central Software System via a friendly decade-long committee process.
And if the properties happen to conflict in how they define some output, well, the one company in the world who has actually implemented all of this “open standard” can decide what happens in that case.