Re: [css-variables] Why so inefficient?

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 10:10 AM, Patrick Dark
<www-style.at.w3.org@patrick.dark.name> wrote:
> On 2/16/2016 5:35 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 12:45 AM, darkdragon <darkdragon-001@web.de>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Currently, you need at least 7(!) characters plus the actual name just to
>>> use one variable. This is quite much to encourage users to use it!
>>>
>>> Why do you need "--" AND "var()"?
>>> Wouldn't be one of it be enough?
>>
>> We need the -- in var(--foo) so that the name matches exactly between
>> definition and use. Anything else is potentially confusing, and makes
>> searching in a document harder.
>>
>> We need a var() function for a few reasons.  For one, there are a few
>> places in CSS where you can have arbitrary names already, like counter
>> styles or animation names, so allowing a bare custom property name
>> would be ambiguous there.  Theoretically we could make it invalid to
>> name your @keyframes or @counter-style rule something that looks like
>> a custom property name, but that means more rules for authors to
>> learn.
>
> I think it would be good to go ahead and do this. I've used CSS variables
> and find that having to declare each variable reference twice—once with
> var() and again with the "--" prefix—is onerous. Being able to eliminate
> var() would continue to address your first concern (i.e., syntax
> consistency) while making the feature significantly easier to use.
>
> One reason it's onerous aside from the verbosity, is that if I create a
> custom property like --color, then try to copy and paste what I just typed
> to multiple locations, I can't do that without first typing "var(" at the
> beginning of what I pasted and ")" at the end of what I pasted, then copying
> that before continuing the paste process. In case it's not obvious, I arrive
> in this situation because it's typically the case that I'll write part of a
> style sheet before deciding that I need variable to ensure that certain
> parts of the style remain consistent.

Yeah, I sympathize with this.  But I disagree that it's sufficiently
onerous to justify the drawbacks of bare keywords.

For example, I *messed up* when I was speccing @counter-style.  By
allowing any arbitrary name, I had to produce a list of disallowed
keywords (and keep it updated, and swallow the possible compat pain if
in the meantime someone *used* a name that I'm now disallowing), and
had to add several subtle and annoying tweaks to the spec,
complicating it and implementations.  If I were writing it today, I'd
require the @counter-style name be a <custom-ident> (the -- prefix) so
they were distinguishable from built-in keywords and could never
collide.  Same with @keyframes - handling an arbitrary keyframes name
in the 'animation' shorthand is really kinda messed up, and required
us to define some pretty weird parsing rules to cover it.  Any future
user-defined names are probably gonna be <custom-ident>s from now on,
to avoid these issues.

(Actually, Firefox is the only one with @counter-style support.  I
wonder if I could get them to make this change. I'll make another
thread. ^_^)

This would, obviously, conflict with treating bare custom-idents as
variable references.

>> For two, var() is required in some circumstances, like when you want
>> to provide a fallback.  In general, a language shouldn't provide
>> multiple ways to do something unless there are good reasons for each,
>> and there isn't a strong reason to omit var() when you're not using
>> any other functionality, so I don't allow it.
>
>
> The name of this feature, var, provides no indication whatsoever that it
> permits fallback values. This is the first I've heard of that functionality
> and finding it in the spec isn't obvious either because the fallback
> feature's description doesn't have its own section. This seems inconsistent
> with your "readability and understandability" principle (quoted below).

I can edit the spec to fix that - thanks for the suggestion. ^_^

> It also seems strange to have this feature, which is unrelated to variables,
> be part of the Variables module when there's already a Conditional Rules
> module that does the same thing. This seems inconsistent with your "a
> language shouldn't provide multiple ways to do something" principle.

Conditional Rules has nothing to do with variable fallback - it's an
expansion on the syntax-fallback behavior that you get from writing a
declaration twice, once with new or prefixed values and once with old.
As I said in my previous email to darkdragon, even if it *did* apply,
it would be *extremely* onerous in practice.  This would fall clearly
under the "unless there's a good reason" escape valve.

>>> Why not something like "v()" as a shortcut (people using jQuery and stuff
>>> are used to such shortcuts!)?
>>
>> While I highly value terseness in CSS and promote it whenever
>> possible, it must be balanced against other concerns, like readability
>> and understandability.  Single-letter names are generally a bad
>> tradeoff here - they only save a little bit, but they make it much
>> more difficult to tell what's being referred to.  The name "var()" is
>> already abbreviated from "variable()", but it's a pretty unambiguous
>> cut, and anyone working in the web platform is already familiar with
>> "var" from JS.
>
>
> If this was seriously a concern, then the syntax would have been something
> more like -var-property so that custom property declarations are clearly
> variables. But it isn't.

It used to be (well, var-*). People complained about the length of the
prefix, so I dropped it down to --*.  It's not as obvious *for
variables*, but Custom Properties are useful for a lot more than
variables, and the --* syntax actually makes them feel similar to
browser-prefixed properties, which is a good thing.

> And, if authors can do without a var() equivalent when invoking variables in
> other languages, I think authors can do without it in CSS. "--" is the
> syntax CSS is using for declaring variables and "--" is required when using
> variables; that follows the paradigm of languages like PHP and is more than
> is required in languages like JavaScript, which doesn't use variable
> signifiers at all.
>
> For more perspective, imagine having to type var() or let() around every
> variable use in JavaScript; that would be absurd.

Other languages don't have the same syntax flexibility of CSS. They
tend to have a very small set of syntaxes for literals, and
*everything else* is a variable of some sort implicitly.  CSS is the
exact opposite - it's got a very wide set of syntax literals, and
literals are the *default*, with variables being relatively rare in
comparison.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 23 February 2016 21:33:44 UTC