- From: Tab Atkins Jr. via GitHub <noreply@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2025 03:31:23 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
> In the long run it ends up better for web developers because future layout modes just get one unified set of properties rather than 5+ prefixes/set of names. In addition to what Ian said, I think *in practice* this doesn't end up being a *useful* unification. We've found via *exhaustive* search that **absolutely nobody can agree** on what the intuitive terms should be for the properties that control "flow normal or reverse" in the two possible axises. This is why [my proposal](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12803#issuecomment-3519260414) just gave up entirely on the subject and said "primary" and "secondary" - completely meaningless terms that avoid trying to assign intuition at all. We also are ending up with several values that only actually apply to one of the three layouts - for example, "balance" only does something in Flexbox, as does the "wrap"/"nowrap" values. We're putting them into the generic syntax for back-compat, but now authors have to memorize that these values *exist* generically, but aren't *usable* generically, but *other* generic values *do* work generically. It's much easier, I believe, for teaching and learning for values that only work in one layout mode to *live* only in one layout mode, syntactically. It just really isn't giving the benefits that we were hoping for, after we figured out what all the practical constraints were. -- GitHub Notification of comment by tabatkins Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12803#issuecomment-3525085974 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Thursday, 13 November 2025 03:31:24 UTC