RE: dollar sign in CSS variable

Well, no. Adding additional characters that are not easy to type does indeed make it worse.

Having identified that $ is not easy to type on some keyboards, the right question is what other characters can be considered, and are any of them better choices?

tex


-----Original Message-----
From: www-international-request@w3.org [mailto:www-international-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of "Martin J. Dürst"
Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2011 5:50 PM
To: Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu
Cc: WWW International
Subject: Re: dollar sign in CSS variable

Hello Kenny,

My general impression is that $ is indeed not that easy to type on some 
keyboards, but that the same is true for # (as you note below, used in 
CSS for color values), { and } (used all over the place in CSS), and 
several other characters. So if CSS was okay the way it was until now, 
it's not that much worse with the $ added.

Regards,    Martin.

On 2011/02/14 8:39, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu wrote:
> Hello internationalization folks,
>
> There is an ongoing hot discussion[1] about a new proposal for CSS,
> namely introducing variables into the CSS format. The proposal uses the
> dollar prefix, say, $var, to indicate variables. A concern about whether
> the dollar sign is *easily* available on keyboards around the worlds was
> raised[2].
>
> Taking a little look at a Wikipedia entry[3], in several keyboard
> layouts, including the Danish and Estonian, the dollar sign can't be
> reached with only the shift key. As far as I know, Perl and PHP use the
> dollar sign as certain variable indicator, but I googled and find no
> complaints about this. I wondering it is considered OK in the
> perspective of internationalization to introduce the dollar sign to CSS.
>
> I had an uncomfortable experience to find the hash on an Italian
> keyboard (because in the world of Semantic Web/Linked Data, the hash is
> widely used), and the Italian girl told me that it isn't that easy for
> her too. What about the dollar sign?
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Feb/thread#msg311
> [2] http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/css/20110209#l-412
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout
>
> Cheers,
> Kenny

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Monday, 14 February 2011 06:37:56 UTC