CSS Gradient Notation from fantasai on 2012-02-08 (www-style@w3.org from February 2012) (original) (raw)

On 01/17/2012 11:51 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:

On Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:37:52 -0800, Robert Biggs<rbiggs@ymail.com> wrote:

I was checking out the latest document http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-images to check up on the status of CSS gradients. I have to say I was shocked and dismayed to see that you're proposition the requirement for prepositions to be used with the positional keywords. I was scratching my head for quite some time. Is that to make it clearer to English speakers what the keywords do? Requiring English preposition will not make it clearer to people who don't speak English. If you want to make it more grammatical English, you should include the indefinite article, e.g. "to the bottom left". Or maybe an adverb or a gerund: "flowing towards the bottom right". And for radial gradients: "positioned at the closest side". And while you're at it, you could get rid of the hyphens in the radial keywords.

I'm being facetious. When the Webkit guys first presented CSS gradients, the Mozilla people complained about the notation being too complicated and came up with a simpler notation. I'm sure you laughed at being required to write from(color), to(color). Funny how you're now suggesting that we have to use prepositions ("to" and "at") with keywords. Don't hobble CSS with English grammatical requirements. No body needs an understanding of English grammar to write HTML or JavaScript or CSS, until now.

By the way, in Spanish, the word for "to" is "a" and the word for at is "a". Spanish speakers will not see your prepositions as a clarification of anything.

The "to" keyword was added to linear gradients because there was significant confusion about whether "top" meant "start from the top (put the 0% color on the top)" or "point toward the top (put the 100% color on the top)".

...

I've not made a change to the draft based on this feedback. If this is acceptable, please reply! (If it's unacceptable, I expect you'll reply as well. ^_^)

So, I see two technical arguments in favor of reverting the change and none in favor. Based on that I can't really justify keeping the 'to'. The arguments are:

  1. Reverting is more compatible with existing usage out there, since the older variants of linear-gradient() are compatible with the request to not use 'to'.
  2. The 'to' preposition is incompatible with the functional notation principles you sent out, and the CSSWG adopted, in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Jan/0933.html Namely, that keywords are only to be used as a last resort for parsing disambiguation where needed.

The argument in favor of rejecting the comment is that the WG discussed the issue already and made a resolution on it and therefore doesn't want to reopen the issue. This is an argument, but not a technical one. I'll also note we do have additional information, i.e. principle #2, that we didn't have when we made that resolution.

So, weighing the arguments, I'm uncomfortable with rejecting this comment without a change.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 8 February 2012 16:38:19 UTC