[css3-grid-layout] Syntax of track lists wrt named grid lines

Looking over the current syntax for declaring named grid lines in
grid-definition-rows/columns, we've come to the conclusion that the
current syntax is *terrible*:

* We're using strings to represent a user-ident, which is inconsistent
with everything else in CSS.
* The syntax is hard to scan and see how many columns/rows there are,
and how things are grouped.

An example of the current syntax, taken from the current spec:

grid-definition-columns: "first" "nav" 150px "main" 1fr "last";
grid-definition-rows: "first" "header" 50px "main" 1fr "footer" 50px "last";

Our current suggestion for fixing this is to switch the line names to
idents, and then use () to surround each set of line names:

grid-definition-columns: (first nav) 150px (main) 1fr (last);
grid-definition-rows: (first header) 50px (main) 1fr (footer) 50px (last);

This immediately seems to be much easier to read and scan - it's easy
for the eye to skip over parentheticals, so you can quickly see how
many tracks there are and what their sizing functions are.

Suggestions?  Anything better?  We'll bring this up on next week's
telcon to decide.

~TJ and fantasai

Received on Thursday, 14 March 2013 18:11:01 UTC