!important: css versioning, and a semantic shift

Hello,

I read a lot of fatalistic comments the last days and wonder if you ever
recon'ed that you are at github, a platform for concurrent versioning. I
don't know what you try to reach but 20 years of css also means that
there was enough time lost to be allowed to do a cleanup. My proposal
is to 'invent' a rule like:

@css: 3;

to make a cut and release you from your should-we-leave-that mentality.

Any page not including this rule is interpreted following css21, and
everyone's fine :) No zillion broken websites and what I had to read
already!

Let's allow cleanups to lift our souls from the suffrage of 'I'm a web
designer - I write stupid stuff - I hate my life!'

But there's more to it, as I already wrote the last days, specifically
about fonts! I mean, you can pledge for certain fonts but you can't
write a @font-metrics rule to choose a layout for the actually chosen
font (yeah, JavaScript, hurray!)

Web designers need to draw semantic decisions. Even more finegrained
pragmatic factual properties and lots of choice, like xx-small to
xx-large, doesn't really serve to this. That's why we all use 'em'.
But there is no 'em' for font-weight and so forth. Specifically, there
is no catch when it ain't work! Let's come back to the rule I proposed:

@font-metrics: ...factors to get a clou of actual font behaviour...

Say, font libraries (also on font servers) can cache benchmarks to
provide factors that can roughly make a guess about how a system font
will behave as a substitute to enable the css declarations to draw
conclusions from this.

Say, a user switches to system fonts with big presence/weight and size.
The rule @font-metrics, in combination with the rule @media, could
decide that now the layout should switch from nifty to blog style. This
is a semantic (context-based all affecting) decision and I'd love to
have this...

Think about it...

Regards,
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Dennis Heuer
einz@verschwendbare-verweise.seinswende.de

Received on Monday, 15 January 2018 14:34:46 UTC