[css-snap-size] Use 'factor' as the term?

Koji,

I mentioned this in IRC, then kept thinking about it for a bit. Here’s some more feedback to mull over:

The feature as described in the draft is a way to constrain lengths to a multiple. I think ‘factor’ or ‘mod’ is a better term for this. Those terms let me know that the value given is going to modify some other value. I’m guessing that ‘factor’ is a bit better for those with less math/programming knowledge.

The draft currently lets you do this for line box heights and available inline size. But the properties refer to ‘height’ and ‘width’ so it’s not very clear that it’s not the element’s height and width being modified. So instead of ‘snap-height’ I suggest the property be named ‘line-height-factor’.

This does two things - first it makes it very clear that it’s line-height being modified. Second, we can treat it as a longhand of ‘line-height’. So if I set ‘line-height’ it clears the ‘line-height-factor’ value - I don’t have to hunt down the new property to find out why my line-heights aren’t what I specified. We could at some point in the future make ‘line-height-factor’ settable in the ‘line-height’ shorthand, if that proves useful.

Then (and I’m less sure about this) your current ‘snap-width’ could change to ‘line-width-factor’. Again, this makes it more clear that what you’re setting affects available inline sizing. In this case there isn’t a property that directly sets available inline size, but one could be added as a shorthand for that and ‘line-width-factor’ in the future if it’s needed.

I think there are other lengths where it might prove useful to add factors - block width and height being the primary case I have in mind. By making *-factor properties longhands and adding line-* to the current pair, we open the door for adding factors to other length properties in the future. This would clear my objection to the current draft - as long as we don’t cut off block size factoring, I’m OK with not defining it right now.

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Wednesday, 2 March 2016 21:30:59 UTC