[css-align][css-writing-modes][naming] Another suggestion for block-axis logical names

fantasai and I were discussing the logical names today while revising
Alignment, and we came up with a new idea for logical axis naming that
we think will be a lot more palatable to people, and makes a ton of
sense in a lot of different contexts.

The idea is this:  use start/end for *both* axises.  When this would
be ambiguous, call them block-start/end and inline-start/end.

This has several benefits:

1. No new names - it keeps us within the existing set of logical
names, which are already accepted as reasonable.
2. Context-sensitive - most properties that use logical directions
only work in a single axis, so it's not really important whether it's
block or inline axis.  This suggestion avoids the author having to
think about it.
3. Context-neutral - some properties, such as the Alignment
properties, can apply to either axis depending on context.  Using
different names for the block and inline axises makes this hard to
deal with, as you need to accept both of them in both properties, and
just map one to the other.  Our suggestion avoids this  - they'll only
accept start/end, and it'll be the appropriate axis.
4. Legacy-compatible - the only current logical properties are
inline-axis, and they use start/end already, so they'd be unchanged.
New properties would cleanly slot into this pre-established pattern.
5. This suggestion helps us establish a decent short name for the
axises, so that logical properties can be named appropriately.  For
example, margin-block and margin-inline would be the margin properties
for the block and inline axis.

There are only a few draft properties/values that would need naming
changes.  The most obvious are in Grid - the
grid-before/after/start/end properties would be renamed to
grid-row-start/end and grid-column-start/end.  This is not only more
obvious (I still have to think about which one I want when writing
examples), but it also follows the shorthand/longhand naming strategy
more closely, without being too long.

Thoughts?  We're going to go ahead and edit Alignment accordingly
today, but we can revert if necessary.

~TJ and fantasai

Received on Thursday, 11 April 2013 19:58:14 UTC