Re: [w3ctag/design-reviews] CSS Properties and Values API Level 1 (#318)

Hey @andruud,

Thanks for getting back to us. David and Travis are assigned to the review, but be advised that Travis and Alex are cycling out of the TAG as of this week.

As you may have seen from other review threads in this repo, it's important for us to understand the motivating use-cases for a feature we're looking to review. The spec itself has relatively minimal example code and the introduction section outlines the layering it provides (which seems great!), but doesn't indicate why this is powerful or helps authors.

Our general guidance is that teams should try to frame this part of their design in an Explainer:

https://github.com/w3ctag/w3ctag.github.io/blob/master/explainers.md

These documents focus on the problem being solved rather than the details of how a solution fits into existing specs. 

We can proceed without an explainer, but if you are able to take a look at the template and pull something together (based on notes from your previous design discussions, for example), that will most likely speed up the process by answering likely questions ahead of time, and giving us more context for the review.

In the meantime, we managed to find something that functions like a partial explainer for your feature:

https://danielcwilson.com/blog/2018/02/houdini-quickstart/

Several questions arise from this outline:

- What's the behavior of a custom property that is used in CSS before it is defined in script? If a value or property is grabbed via the OM before it's defined, what is its representation? After? HTML Custom Elements have an "upgrade" phase; is there an equivalent? The discussion in [2.2, Example 2](https://drafts.css-houdini.org/css-properties-values-api-1/#the-registerproperty-function) hints at the problem but the example code doesn't handle it
- How are the syntax classes defined? Is it possible to define new classes from script?
- Why are the syntax classes defined as strings?
- Is there a CSS Type'd OM version of this API? Could the `syntax` values be taken from [TypedOM types](https://www.w3.org/TR/css-typed-om-1/#numeric-value)?

Thanks for asking for feedback and for working with us.

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