Re: Suggestion: Inheritance

> It brings unprecedented flexibility and maintainability to CSS, 
> particularly in multi-client environments where design templates could 
> simply create a whole new design by just changing some basic rules.

Some have rightfully argued that these abilities already exist in other 
tools, that are in use today. A new spec that covers the same ground 
runs the risk of supporting the derisive joke, "The great thing about 
standards is that there are so many to choose from."

Yes, a client-side processor would have many different and interesting 
abilities over a server-side processor. It's intriguing, and I for one 
would use such a thing.

The problems with your proposal are that you suggest using selectors as 
identifiers, and you propose using the computed value of rules.

Rules describe how to arrive at the computed values for elements; they 
themselves do not have computed values (e.g., a rule for a font size of 
1em may have a computed value of 16.5px in one paragraph and a computed 
value of 10px in another).

Since selectors are not unique, and can be very messy once you start 
cascading, you likely want to create some way to identify rule blocks. 
Once you assign unique identifiers to rule blocks (to avoid, for 
example, cases when a selector with spaces is used where a property 
value may contain spaces as delimiters), then you have essentially 
moved your proposal into the realm of the variables/constants/etc. that 
gets discussed here about once a month. To that discussion, you 
contribute the notion of assigning entire rule blocks to a variable 
name, instead of just single values -- I like that idea.

-- 

	Ben Curtis : webwright
	bivia : a personal web studio
	http://www.bivia.com
	v: (818) 507-6613

Received on Thursday, 19 May 2005 19:16:23 UTC