Re: dollar sign in CSS variable

The dollar sign is widely used in many other scripting and programing
languages.  Introducing another symbol to denote variables
would just make learning CSS more difficult than necessary with
little merit, IMHO.  I think you can find a different group of
people who find it difficult to enter no matter what symbol to choose.

On 2/13/11 10:37 PM, Tex Texin wrote:
> 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
>

-- 
KUROSAKA ("Kuro") Teruhiko, Oakland, California, USA

Received on Monday, 14 February 2011 07:03:58 UTC