- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2012 00:52:28 -0700
- To: "Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu" <kennyluck@csail.mit.edu>
- Cc: "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>, w3c-css-wg <w3c-css-wg@w3.org>, "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>, 史绪胜 <xushengs@gmail.com>
On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 8:23 PM, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu <kennyluck@csail.mit.edu> wrote: > (12/07/05 11:06), L. David Baron wrote: >> Bare parens have the following two serious disadvantages: >> >> * it's harder for somebody reading and trying to understand CSS to >> search for documentation on them since there's no name to search >> for (unlike with a functional syntax that allows an author >> encountering it for the first time to search Google for "CSS >> calc()" > > This seems like a marketing issue and we have a precedent. We have no > problem calling the bare parenthesis after @media "Media Query" and so > we can as well invent a term here that can be used to search for > documentation and such. The examples aren't really parallel. A media query starts with "@media", which you can go look up to see what the syntax is. There's no such prefix for bare parentheses showing up in some arbitrary property's value. >> * they'd prevent the working group from using parentheses in any >> other contexts in CSS property syntax (though the first point is >> also an argument against most other possible uses) > > My bet is that this is not likely to happen. It's not like CSS is a > fast-changing language so worrying too much about "reserving for the > future" doesn't make much sense to me, and if you want grouping > constructs in the future, we still have [] and <>. One must always worry about being future-friendly, or else you'll make mistakes that are really annoying later. (You'll probably make them anyway, but hopefully less often if you're watching out for them.) Parentheses are a grouping construct, and don't have much meaning beyond that. Assigning them the meaning of "math goes inside here" would be quite unique, and somewhat weird imo. > I think calculation is fundamental enough in CSS and it deserves a > special syntax. It already has a special syntax - it's called "calc()". ~TJ
Received on Thursday, 5 July 2012 07:53:16 UTC