I don't think this is a solution. I've been thinking about this for the past couple of days, after watching some Alan Kay talks and revisiting some of Bret Victor's articles.
I think the fundamental problem here is about structured semantic content and its presentation. When those two domains meet, it gets messy very, very quickly. At a certain point it gets hard to tell the two areas apart, especially when it comes to interactive applications.
Hardcore HTML advocates such as Zeldman seem to have the worldview of 19th century librarians (no offense intended). I find it outright irritating that a board could define some semantic elements (header, article, section, etc.) and expect the world to be happy with this limited array for expressing 'meaning' and 'intent'. And again, it's often hard to divorce the meaning of content from its actual presentation.
Yes, the problem is that CSS's structural presentation is ultimately tied to the DOM. Funny you bring this up, as I commented earlier here:
"GSS was created b/c our company's main product, the Grid (still in stealth mode), is doing some radical things with design of newsfeeds, we need layout to be completely decoupled from the DOM. A fairly developed Float / Flexbox-based layout becomes as much of a CSS affair as an HTML one; changing layouts requires a whole new set of div wrappers. CSS was designed to separate presentation from content, and that ideal has unforeseen manifold benefit when actually realized."
Here's an example,
http://gridstylesheets.org/demos/apple/
notice the button & panel layout as you change the screen size. Now, view-page-source & notice how every element is a direct child of <body>, no parent-child nesting... Here's a recording of talk I recently gave at FluentConf that delves deeper into this: https://vimeo.com/91393694
You say you don't think this is a solution, but you don't say why.
If HTML's limited expressiveness is your gripe, I'd say React has already alleviated that for us. Components can be named very expressively, and your tree structure ends up reading very well. Really, HTML becomes the compile-to language.
Web components could step in and help this further, and there's no reason they couldn't be used within React to make even the output HTML more semantic.
I think the fundamental problem here is about structured semantic content and its presentation. When those two domains meet, it gets messy very, very quickly. At a certain point it gets hard to tell the two areas apart, especially when it comes to interactive applications.
Hardcore HTML advocates such as Zeldman seem to have the worldview of 19th century librarians (no offense intended). I find it outright irritating that a board could define some semantic elements (header, article, section, etc.) and expect the world to be happy with this limited array for expressing 'meaning' and 'intent'. And again, it's often hard to divorce the meaning of content from its actual presentation.