Re: [css3-fonts][css-variables][css-counter-styles-3][css3-values] Case sensitivity of user-defined identifiers

On 10/3/12 2:12 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> The problem is that, as long as we stick with idents, we'd like to
> allow overriding the existing styles as well.

Hmm.  I guess.  That seems pretty weird to me, but if people want it....

> I don't like this.  We generally force people into strings only when
> required - when the necessary name is defined by something besides the
> author, so there's no guarantee that it'll match the ident grammar
> (and making people remember the ident grammar and use escaping is
> painful).  Idents are more convenient (two less characters) and more
> consistent with the rest of CSS.

Quite frankly, I think the restriction to idents for user-defined stuff 
like variables and counter style names is a huge pain in general.  In 
programming languages it leads to things like camelCase and whatnot that 
are often much less readable than just having a multi-word string...

But yes, lots of tradeoffs here.  If all else were equal, I'd agree that 
we should use idents, not strings, because that's what people expect. 
But it's not clear that all else is equal.

-Boris