Re: Proposal for adding variable declaration blocks

On Jul 17, 2008, at 12:43 PM, fantasai wrote:

> Mike Wilson wrote:
>> It's great that you are working with this!
>> The "define" suggestion looks nice. A slight variation that I also  
>> think is nice, is blending in some of the ideas from your original  
>> proposal which would result in:
>>  @define {
>>    myForegroundColor: blue;
>>    myBackgroundColor: green;
>>    myButtonStyle: {
>>      border: outset silver;
>>      background: silver;
>>    }
>>  }
>> (It probably has to be adjusted somewhat to play well with the
>> CSS parser, but you get the general idea.)
>> I agree with Brad and others that the media stuff could instead
>> be done with normal media blocks.
>> Lastly, I'd put my vote on fantasai's "$ dereferencing" or  
>> something similar and well known.
>
> I think my personal take would be to use =var=. I liked Brad's
> suggestion of using =, but =var seems a bit unbalanced to me.
>
>  h1 {
>    =myHeaderStyle=;
>    background-color: =myBackgroundColor=;
>  }
>
> Not sure what other people think. :) It's not a well-known syntax,
> but you can use it for both kinds of dereferencing.
>
> ~fantasai

That's interesting. The thing I like about the equals sign on the left  
is that it points to the thing it is being assigned to. So for  
instance, if you ignored the CSS notation (and had the equal sign only  
on the left), you would have something like this:

  h1=myHeaderStyle
  background-color=myBackgroundColor

...which makes sense to me because you are assigning myHeaderStyle to  
the h1, and myBackgroundColor to the background-color. As a Web  
author, I am familiar with such assignments within JavaScript (and  
VBScript).

I do not understand the argument others have made that a dollar sign  
would be more natural. To me it is just another abstract symbol  
without anything to make it more understandable as a variable  
identifier. Is it because in some programming languages it is used to  
denote string-type variables?

Received on Friday, 18 July 2008 04:28:56 UTC