Re: author-defined color aliases

The main reasons for not allowing defined aliases are as follows:
1) The use of aliases adds complexity to the parsing of CSS.
2) The use of a preprocessor or an equivalent can get the job done.
3) The use of aliases causes problems with backwards compatability.
4) The use of aliases leads to unavoidable conflicts between author and 
and user stylesheets in those user agents which do support aliases.

Of these four reasons, #4 is the most intractible as I pointed out in 
an earlier post:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003May/0086.html

The only way to solve that is to limit the scope of aliases to the 
stylesheet in which they are located and once you do that you have 
effecively nullified any advantage that definining aliases in CSS would 
have over using a preprocessor.  About the only advantage that would 
remain is standardization of the way that assignment of defined aliases 
to values and I find that to be insignificant.  Anyone with the 
knowledge of the advantages of aliases and the need for their use is 
surely going to have access to some tool that will do preprocessing and 
know how to use it since it is hardly the most demading of concepts. It 
may be a kludgy tool such as using the search and replace function 
availanle on any competent text editor, but they will have access to 
it.

Received on Saturday, 21 June 2003 04:53:50 UTC