Re: [css3-syntax] Dash in Values

On Thu, 27 Nov 2003, Christoph Päper wrote:

> I wonder whether it would be useful to allow or even require user agents to
> silently remove possible dashes in keyword values.

Sounds interesting - though I would say that if allowed, it should be
required as well, to avoid confusion and incompatibilities.

I've often seen people complain that they don't remember when to use a
dash or not, e.g. in white-space: nowrap, it's hard (to some people at
least) to remember that whitespace must have a dash and no-wrap must not.
And this is somewhat unsatisfactory, since the whole idea of using dashes
is to make things _simpler_ to people.

(Self-pedantry: it's actually "hyphen-minus", not "dash", by
character code standards.)

> This way the current unsatisfactory situation of different naming schemes
> could be avoided, e.g. "nowrap" and "pre-wrap" could be written "no-wrap" and
> "prewrap" also, however the author prefers.

But then authors could get confused with property names - they would need
to remember that dashes can be omitted in keyword values but not in
property names.

So how about simply declaring dashes as insignificant both in property
names and in keyword values? Then we would face the problem that authors
might think that the principle extends to class names as well, but maybe
that would be tolerable - such names are, after all, defined by the author
and he can be expected to manage them.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 27 November 2003 01:28:47 UTC