Re: CSS Aliases

I don't see how this would be overly useful. Your initial declaration of 
a specified element ".product" is all fine and well enough but if you 
required an exception to that you could just as easily define the 
exception ".product.service".

Although the way your suggesting would stop the need for multiple 
classes,  I do not see a major issue with applying two classes for 
specific exceptions.

Given your second example how hard would it be to have a "<tr 
class='alternateRow oddRow'>"

The major problem I see with what your suggesting what happens when 
someone does this.

@alias selector(.alternateRow) selector(#myTable tr.oddRow)
@alias selector(#myTable tr.oddRow) selector(.alternateRow)

You might think that unlikely but it will happen. Circular reference in 
this case would be difficult to deal with to say the least. Not to 
mention the poor guy who inherits a style sheet with this defined would 
be pretty hard pressed to figure out your intention.

Just my two cents,

Regards,

Barry Rader

Matt Patenaude wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I was working on a project today, and I thought of something that might 
> be a useful and powerful addition to CSS: aliases.
> 
> It happens all too often that I want to completely duplicate a style 
> definition for a class to another class, in order to have a better 
> semantic name for the data I'm styling. For instance, lets say I have 
> the class "product" and the class "service." On my page, I would like 
> these to be style similarly. If I have an existing declaration for 
> "product" like so...
> 
> .product {
>     font-weight: bold;
>     ...
> }
> 
> ... it isn't a problem, I can just change the selector to ".product, 
> .service". However, let's say my rules get a little more complex:
> 
> div.product:first-child > h3 + p {
>     font-weight: bold;
> }
> 
> Contrived example? Absolutely. But just to make the point, the selector 
> would now have to become "div.product:first-child > h3 + p, 
> div.service:first-child > h3 + p", which is more than a little 
> redundant. And let's say I have several rules, all of which contain 
> .product in some permutation or another. Isn't it an awful lot of work 
> to have to duplicate those selectors across the board (along with being 
> difficult to maintain), just to add a little extra semantic goodness?
> 
> My proposal: CSS Aliases. CSS should allow you to map one selector as an 
> alias as another selector, that works intelligently across the board. In 
> a simple example, imagine something like this:
> 
> @alias selector(.product) selector(.service)
> 
> In this example, any element with the class of "service" would inherit 
> all styles of the class "product" automatically. Let's make it a bit 
> more complex:
> 
> @alias selector(.alternateRow) selector(#myTable tr.oddRow)
> 
> Essentially, something intelligent like this would make it much easier 
> to adapt CSS styles to pages regardless of the semantic naming of their 
> elements. In the example above, the styles for anything with class 
> "alternateRow" is also applied to rows with class "oddRow" in the table 
> identified as "myTable".
> 
> The beauty here is that the selectors can be as complex as desired. For 
> instance, let's say that, through inherited styles, the first paragraph 
> of every "product" has styling I want to apply to the entirety of every 
> "client." Even if I don't have a rule definition called ".product 
> p:first-child", this should still work:
> 
> @alias selector(.product p:first-child) selector(.client)
> 
> If I tried really hard, I could come up with a more complex example that 
> would show even more benefit to something like this, but I think what 
> I've come up with is sufficient. ;) It may be superfluous, but 
> personally I think it would be a great language feature to have.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Sincerely,
> Matt Patenaude
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 2008 13:15:11 UTC