Re: New CSS declaration for width and height

On 19 April 2016 at 21:58, Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Apr 12, 2016, at 12:47 PM, Giovanna Ruiu <giovannaruiu6@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Good morning,
>
> I am Giovanna, a Front End Developer from London.
>
> I would like to suggest a new CSS declarations to use in case you have to
> specify width and height, and these two must be exactly the same.
>
> For example, when you cannot leave either width or height to auto, and
> have to specify for both exactly the same value.
>
> It would be handy to have a declaration such as “*size: 100px*” which
> would mean “width - height: 100px”.
>
> Even if by using variables we would have to change only that once, I think
> this little line could be of use in many cases and would certainly save one
> line of code, which is always good.
>
> The web is full of squares and I think developers would benefit from
> having this little declaration ready to use.
>
> Hopefully you will take this into consideration, thank you!
>
>
> I think this is not a bad idea. 'size' could be a 2-value shorthand for
> width and height, where giving a single value is the same as giving the
> same value twice. So 'size: 100px' would be the same as 'size: 100px
> 100px', which would be the same as 'width:100px; height:100px'.
>

Note that there were already earlier discussions about constraining width
and height:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Dec/0004.html
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Dec/0290.html
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Sep/0034.html
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Aug/0562.html

I didn't read through all of them, though the proposals I saw so far were:

   1. A new property for setting both values at the same time (like in this
   thread)
   2. New functions width() and height() taking a percentage indicating a
   portion of the related dimension.
   3. New units w and h and/or %w and %h indicating a portion of the
   related dimension.

The latter two imply issues related to cyclic resolution, but allow more
flexibility in regard of constraining width and height with each other.

Sebastian