Re: [css3-fonts][css-variables][css-counter-styles-3][css3-values] Case sensitivity of user-defined identifiers

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> On 10/3/12 2:12 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> I don't like this.  We generally force people into strings only when
>> required - when the necessary name is defined by something besides the
>> author, so there's no guarantee that it'll match the ident grammar
>> (and making people remember the ident grammar and use escaping is
>> painful).  Idents are more convenient (two less characters) and more
>> consistent with the rest of CSS.
>
> Quite frankly, I think the restriction to idents for user-defined stuff like
> variables and counter style names is a huge pain in general.  In programming
> languages it leads to things like camelCase and whatnot that are often much
> less readable than just having a multi-word string...

A nice benefit of CSS over most programming languages is that it, like
Lisp, can use dashes in its idents.  Many people find that more
readable than camel-case.

> But yes, lots of tradeoffs here.  If all else were equal, I'd agree that we
> should use idents, not strings, because that's what people expect. But it's
> not clear that all else is equal.

I think you're making this to be a larger problem than it is.  The
easy solution (just make user-idents ASCII-ci) is trivial.

~TJ