Re: [css-values] Deprecating the 3-value <position> form

On 10/08/2013 09:38 PM, Dirk Schulze wrote:
>
> On Oct 9, 2013, at 2:35 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The 3-value position form (which allows things like "left 20px 50px"
>> as an equivalent to "left 20px top 50px") is barely used, but
>> extremely confusing, and makes it very difficult to use <position>
>> alongside anything else - it's too often grammatically ambiguous.
>>
>> There seems to be at least moderate agreement that this form is a
>> mistake (at least, between me, fantasai, Alan, and Dirk).  Would
>> anyone mind if we deprecated it, making it a quirk of
>> background-position, and just define <position> to only have the 1/2/4
>> value clauses?
>
> I would go one step further and say that 4 arguments are not the way
> to go in the future (but can not be undone in backgrounds and borders
> and therefore CSS Masking). W have calc() for things like that and I
> think we should not encourage the usage of <position> in any other
> spec than these two.

I strongly disagree with this statement for two reasons:
   1. Calc(100% - x) is imho rather more awkward than having an explicit
      syntax defining which corner to offset from. (I know some others
      feel the opposite: the difference seems to be related to the level
      of comfort with math and programming.)
   2. It cannot expand to handle logical coordinates, which i18n has
      been requesting for quite some time now.

#2 is not an aesthetic preference. It is a functional limitation of
approaching this problem with calc().

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 9 October 2013 07:50:12 UTC