Re: [css-variables] ...let's change the syntax

> I am with Marat here: we just shall allow any arbitrary property name
> that is not known to the given CSS processor to be treated as custom
> property

That's simply impossible. Imagine some library would have used the 
"transform" property to provide 2d transforms. Now, browsers decide to 
support "transform" and start to honnour the property (validate syntax 
according to the new specification and drop invalid rules, apply scaling at 
the browser level, and have other side effects...). How can a page using the 
library still continue to work properly? It can't.

The only way we could accept this is by allowing authors do "declare" their 
custom properties so that the browser stop to recognize them as normal 
properties even if they can. That's out of scope for the current CSS Custom 
Properties level (but I don't see why we could not envision such a change in 
a further revision, if we think it's worth (I think there are valid reasons 
you may want to declare your custom properties, but those reasons only make 
sense once CSS-CP L2 & typing strategies)).



> and to have prop() "functionoid" that will allow to refer any property,
> like:
>    div { border-color: red; color: prop(border-color); }

Yes, we should. But, again, this is out of scope for the current iteration 
of Custom Properties because it would require some unwanted implementation 
overhead. There will be no problem to add this to CSS Custom Properties L2, 
though, if we can convince implementors it's worth; at least for now it's a 
too big change.




> I do remember that IE6 supported arbitrary named CSS properties and sky 
> didn't
> fall since when.

IE still do. I use this for my polyfills by the way (which improves the 
performance dramatically in IE).

By the way, I got hurt by the exact issue I described before for my 
[css-regions] polyfill. IE11 started to support "break-before" and some 
demos relying on the polyfill stopped working in IE because the stylesheets 
contained "break-before: region" which IE11 doesn't recognize and dropped 
(demos using "break-before: always" continued to work, however).

Received on Friday, 14 March 2014 08:57:15 UTC