Re: [community-group] [RFC] Format specification (#1)

> The new tokens format has not these constraints and due linking and reusing is a core feature of this new format (to implement systems like Atomic design mentioned by @ManeeshChiba) , it should be the less verbose as possible. 

I like this statement, @oscarotero. I may appear at odds with it sometimes. To me, there is writing something that works with legacy CSS, and then there is writing something that works with CSS itself.

To use a kitchen analogy, working with CSS itself can be like working with flour, sugar, water, and yeast. Meanwhile, working with legacy CSS can be like working with canned dough from the refrigerator. I love biscuits from a can! But if our canned dough was for biscuits and we wanted to make a cake, I would totally understand and endorse the decision to just use the core ingredients.

We are still limited by core ingredients. In the kitchen analogy, we can’t turn the sugar into stevia, and we can’t turn the water into wine. In CSS, we can’t change declarations into rules.

To be specific, in a [list of declarations](https://www.w3.org/TR/css-syntax-3/#consume-list-of-declarations) — like within a `typography {}` rule — we can’t read `main:last-child ` as a declaration until we move ahead to reveal the more complete CSS as `main:last-child {}`, then retroactively decide that it was actually a rule. That is until we read ahead even further to reveal that the CSS was `main:last-child {};` and decide that actually it was a declaration the whole time.

In a spirit of helpfulness, I hope this helps explain why I will push for any CSS-like language to follow CSS syntactically, even if it isn’t attempting to be compatible with legacy CSS features. 🙏 

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Received on Friday, 17 July 2020 20:05:08 UTC