title: Styling languages that enforce more discipline than CSS? (But not LESS and SASS)
body: <p>CSS style sheets have a habit of growing big and chaotic over time.</p>
  
  <p>There are a lot of rules, hints, and schools of thought that help achieving cleaner CSS. (For example <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2253110/how-to-manage-css-explosion">here</a>) However, all those require constant alertness, activity and a <em>lot</em> of discipline on the maintainer's end, with mixed real-world success. As <a href="http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2011/04/28/our-best-practices-are-killing-us/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Nicole Sullivan so nicely puts it:</a> </p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>In fact, in most cases, the things we considered best practices were leading to the bad outcomes we sought to avoid. I realized (unpopular though it might be), that we couldn’t make it work out well by trying harder. Each time we start a new project, we think “this time, I’m going to keep the code clean. This time the project will be a shining example of what can be done with CSS.” And without fail, over time, as more content and features are added to the site, the code becomes a spaghetti tangle of duplication and unpredictability.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Are there any efforts to create a language of some sort, with strict structural rules and a merciless compiler, that enforces strict rules that prevent style sheets from becoming spaghetti? The compiled end result would be CSS.</p>
  
  <p>I have no idea what such a language would look like and whether, given the vast amount of possibilities and combinations, this is a solvable problem at all.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any research in this field? Anything to try out?</p>
  
  <p>One <em>very</em> interesting related tool is <a href="http://csslint.net/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">CSS Lint</a>, but what I'm asking about goes even farther than that.</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Edit:</strong> LESS and SASS absolutely go into the right direction, but they are not what I am looking for. They introduce some very nice features and are a godsend for the CSS developer, but what I'm, asking about goes even further and more into defined, enforced structures.</p>
  </blockquote>