Re: css3-background: grammar issue

On Feb 24, 2010, at 2:48 AM, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Brad Kemper  
> <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:
>> background: url(img.png) / 90%;
>> or...
>> background:  / 90%;
>
> Both of these look like nonsense to me.  A slash shouldn't exist
> unless there's actually something *there* to separate.

I disagree. In border-image you can have nothingness between the two  
slashes. It doesn't make it look like nonsense; it is perfectly clear  
and readable. As long as you know what values can appear on which  
sides of each slash (something that is at least as easy to learn as  
'as' meaning 'size'), then it makes perfect sense.

>
>> It is also used in /* comments */, where it does a similarly good  
>> job of separating comments from the values around them.
>
> I think comments are pretty clearly something else altogether.

Obviously. The point is that the slash character works very well  
visually to separate out one run of text (comments, values, whatever)  
from another. It works better than a pipe character, for instance, in  
that it creates a little more horizontal whitespace to separate, while  
still being full height to stand out clearly from it's surroundings,  
and doesn't look as much like a lowercase L. It is much more quickly  
distinguishable as a separator than, say, a couple of (often)  
lowercase letters in a shorthand already full of possible keywords. If  
I were to design a character to be used as a separator (other than the  
space character) for a new alphabet, it would probably look a lot like  
a slash.

Received on Tuesday, 23 February 2010 19:39:30 UTC