- From: Tobie Langel <tobie@codespeaks.com>
- Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2015 22:26:02 +0200
- To: public-webapps@w3.org
On Fri, Jun 12, 2015, at 19:41, Léonie Watson wrote: > Is there a succinct explanation of why the is= syntax is disliked? The > info on the WHATWG wiki explains where is= breaks, but doesn’t offer much > on the syntax issue [1]. Esthetics aside, the main issue it is takes the concept of inheritance developers are familiar with and stands it on its head. The idea with inheritance is that you build a new object and it happens to inherit from another one, so for example: <my-button extends=button> makes a lot of sense. Clearly, you're building a new element that extends the capabilities of the existing button object. With the is= syntax, however, what it is you're doing isn't clear at all: <button is=my-button> What's the message here? Oh this is just a button. Oh wait no it's not, it's a my-button. But does it actually inherit from button? Mmm. Not clear from the syntax. Further more, what about when you add a bunch of extra attributes in there: <button value="45" class="button button-large" is="my-button" id="cta" /> It becomes hard to spot that this element isn't actually a traditional button. Things get easily lost when scanning code. I'm also concerned developers will mistakenly write: <my-button is=button> As it is much closer in form to what they want to achieve (see the extend=parent syntax I wrote earlier). So in summary it's ugly, has a high cognitive load, doesn't express the developers intent (actually even expresses the opposite), is hard to spot when reading code, and is error prone. Hope this helps. :) --tobie
Received on Saturday, 13 June 2015 12:28:41 UTC