Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-values] Radians considered useless without π (#309)

Indeed and I already acknowledged that those preprocessors inherently need a respective constant just as much as Javascript needs `Math.PI`, while CSS has the conversion baked into units. My point was, that existing author experience with them could inform the design of future CSS features, even if common experience with math did not. 

In the end, however, it still and as always comes down to whether browser vendors, who staff the CSSWG, consider the author benefits worth the implementation costs. Obviously, I am much in favor of additional convenience features like this. 
I reckon that there is overall agreement with the topic of this issue: `rad` as is can only reasonably be used by scripts, not by humans directly. We simply disagree whether this constitutes sufficient reason to add either another angular unit (which is a long established concept) or a numeric constant (which was proposed rather recently).

Btw., `rad` is of course [1] dimensionally, and someone could be inclined to argue that angles in CSS therefore should always be able to be expressed as plain numbers equaling radians, but we do have the precedent of hues in colors, which are interpreted as degrees when they are stated without a unit. Likewise, percentages are sometimes equivalent to floats, e. g. in alpha opacity values and almost in `line-height`, but not in general, because floats cannot be distinguished from integers which may have different interpretations, e. g. in RGB color notation. 

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Received on Sunday, 26 May 2019 11:04:09 UTC