W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > public-css-archive@w3.org > July 2020

Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-values] Math Constant phi for Golden Ratio (#4702)

From: Christoph Päper via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2020 07:54:20 +0000
To: public-css-archive@w3.org
Message-ID: <issue_comment.created-660445869-1595058860-sysbot+gh@w3.org>
> if someone can provide a use-case that isn't solved equally well by using 1.6, I could change my position. 

I thought I did just that by pointing out the problem with unequal reciprocal values, e. g. a tall vs. a wide “Golden” rectangle. Authors can use approximations for sure, but they cannot rely on a *single* approximation to apply in all cases sufficiently.

> It is completely reasonable to either inline a slightly more precise value here (1.618), or store a high-precision value for phi in a variable and use it in (…) calculations

How is this work to be done – possibly introducing mistakes – by every single author more reasonable than making a predefined constant available to all authors?

Your arguments against a predefined exact constant apparently are:

- Approximations are always good enough.
- Everyone can calculate it to arbitrary precision themselves.

I think I have demonstrated that the first one is not true. The second one became true with recent additions to CSS, but it is counter to convenience, redundancy and error avoidance. 

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by Crissov
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4702#issuecomment-660445869 using your GitHub account
Received on Saturday, 18 July 2020 07:54:22 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Tuesday, 5 July 2022 06:42:11 UTC