- From: Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>
- Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2015 10:57:44 +0100
- To: "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>
Hi there, I just stumbled upon a set of slides authored by Wilson Page from Mozilla about WebComponents in Gaia. And in this set, I found the following slide (please note these great slides are just a live example of CSS Variables usage and I link to a screenshot of them here only as such): http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSyy2UGWcAA2lbh.png Reading this slide triggered many, many comments here. So I'd like this mailing-list to record my POV on the -- syntax: 1. I still find it our ugliest syntactic decision in 20 years 2. I still find it incredibly error-prone 3. it allows an author to write the perfectly valid .two-columns { column-count: var(--column-count); -moz-column-count: var(--column-count); -webkit-column-count: var(--column-count); --column-count: 2; } and such a rule seems to me so awful I'm shaking my head in despair. Custom Properties are - I did not change of opinion - a superb way of nicely adding variables to CSS. But first, if they are 'properties', I don't think we should be able to give the same name to a property and a custom property; one could argue the names will never be the same since -- is part of the custom property's name... I'm far from accepting that argument as enough. I think we're making a very bad decision allowing things like 'background: var(--background)'. I perfectly understand the technical details here, and I am replying it's also our duty to care about the non-technical details that matter to our main users, web agencies. Second, from a readability and maintainance point of view, even $foo would be better than --foo. Unfortunately, $foo is impossible to avoid collisions with CSS preprocessors. But that's probably not a good enough reason to pick up a double dash. If $foo is universally understood as a variable, --foo is universally understood as a decrement. A very bad choice again. It's still time to offer better than what we have now. My 0.02€. </Daniel>
Received on Monday, 2 November 2015 09:58:12 UTC