Re: [CSS3] Some thoughts about functions, notation and gradient().

On Aug 19, 2009, at 9:19 AM, Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:

> Brad Kemper wrote:
>> On Aug 18, 2009, at 11:28 PM, Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
>>> background-color: linear-gradient(
>>>                     start:0% 0%,
>>>                     stop: 100% 100%,
>>>                     color-stop: 0% white,
>>>                     color-stop: 50% red ,
>>>                     color-stop: 100% blue );
>> I think that is way too verbose.
>
> But human readable and machine parse-able.
>
> Proposed syntaxes I've seen so far in linear-gradient() are
> not readable (that is subjective of course) and not
> unambiguously parseable.
>
> That use of '/' as a some kind of separator with absolutely non-clear
> grammatic nature is very bad.

I'm strongly in favor of the more verbose, but much more human- 
readable form above. Compared to that, the current suggestions, like:

linear-gradient(30px center / 50% / green -50%, wheat -30%, wheat 30%,  
green 50%)

seem like complete voodoo.

In these days of auto-completing editors and authoring tools,  
conciseness isn't necessarily the primary concern. I'm much rather  
have a syntax that I can type without having to look it up, and can  
quickly visually scan without having to count slashes.

This gradient discussion has gone on a long time, and it feels like  
there's is premature convergence onto a very non human-friendly  
syntax. It's time to step back, summarize the conversation, and boil  
the proposals down to a few contenders.

Simon

Received on Thursday, 20 August 2009 16:12:05 UTC