Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-conditional-4] Rename @when to @if (#6684)

> However, I’m not sure how big the percentage of websites that use Sass is. When we analyzed websites that included sourcemaps, [out of approximately 5 million webpages, only about 250K included sourcemaps to Sass files](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sMWXWjMujqfAREYxNbG_t1fOJKYCA6ASLwtz4pBQVTw/edit#gid=1725366566).

I'm slightly confused here - by the numbers you're providing here, 250k out of 5M is 5%. That's an enormous percentage when considering breakage, but the rest of your comment here is implying that it's a small number.

> I'll be blunt. The fact that these issues keep coming up should have hinted by now that you folks need to make a shift of direction instead of inventing syntax that looks like plausible CSS, then trying to contort CSS syntax to avoid clashing with yours.

Allow me to also be somewhat blunt: this might have been a useful comment to make a literal decade+ ago when @if was first being added to Sass, but it is instead a decade+ hence, and we are currently dealing with the fallout of decisions that are long past made, not a recent or upcoming decision. This point thus appears to be moot.

>> Sass is a CSS superset, and our core promise to users is that we support all valid CSS as-is.
> This sounds like a philosophical purity argument, which is at the bottom of the [priority of constituencies](https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies).
> If following your "core promise" to users is actively making CSS worse, maybe it's not sensible to follow that anymore.

This is absolutely wrong - language design like this is an author-level concern. Sass positioned itself as a CSS superset ("support[ing] all valid CSS as-is") *because it's good for their users (authors)*, not because it's interesting in some theoretical sense. Sass users can use all of their existing CSS knowledge without having to worry about their Sass additions clashing with something, making it easier to read, write, and understand.

I made this point in the meeting discussion - this is an authors-vs-authors disagreement, and trying to cast it as being on separate levels of the priority-of-constituencies is incorrect and misleading. (And in any case, different levels of the PoC are *not* absolute determiners; we sometimes make things worse for users if they would be much better for authors, or worse for authors if they would be much better for UAs, etc. The PoC just helps inform the relative weights we should be assigning to different factors.)

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Received on Thursday, 17 March 2022 21:26:32 UTC