Re: [csswg-drafts] Proposal: CSS Abbreviation Mode (@abbrev) (#13109)

I don’t think this will turn out to be a viable thing to standardize in this group.

We have a hard enough time arriving at the full name for properties and values. I think adding on agreement over what the shorter form should be could take more time than is ever saved by using a canonical set of abbreviations. Should the most common properties should have 2-, 3- or 4-character abbreviations? Which properties deserve the shortest ones, and which will have to make do with longer abbreviations or no abbreviation at all?

You will likely encounter strong resistance to this proposal on readability grounds, and separate resistance to adding a switch.

So my position is that this should stay at the tooling level. Preprocessors and other tools can decide to share sets of abbreviations if they agree that is a benefit, or different tools can provide different sets of abbreviations to accommodate different preferences on brevity versus readability.

I am going to close this issue as not something this group plans to work on for now. But for those who disagree with me and would like to add support, do add comments here and we can always re-open the issue if it’s justified.

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Received on Sunday, 16 November 2025 00:31:12 UTC