RE: Shorthands resetting properties they cannot set

The set of properties a longhand is able to express is something that is bound to change over time. When we decide whether a property resets another, we think about what a shorthand could reasonably redefine someday, not what it actually can redefine today, because we build the platform iteratively and cannot go back on such decisions easily. 

I furthermore disagree with the statement that says it is confusing that "border: something" resets "border-image", I really like when a property resets all the properties that have the same prefix, and find it confusing otherwise. If as an author you write "border: 3px solid white" you want a "3px solid white" border, and not sometimes this turn into non-white border because another rule in the document did set a border-image previously. 

Regardless of my own preference, I am not sure we have a point strong enough to cause all browsers not to follow the spec and have to fix their implementation as there is a real cost involved here and I'd rather spend the time fixing something useful than tweaking the behavior of a property that, as you mention, has minimal use anyway.




-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Glazman [mailto:daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com] 
Sent: Sunday, 3 December, 2017 01:01
To: www-style list <www-style@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Shorthands resetting properties they cannot set

Le 02/12/2017 à 00:44, Tab Atkins Jr. a écrit :

> We've got a number of properties that this applies to, and several of 
> them can't be changed at this point, so it's kinda a moot point, no?

I don't think so.

Tweaking the behaviour of 'border' does not seem to me difficult; the usage of border-image seems extremely low, if not negligible. This is one of the properties the WG spent considerable time on but that did not really take off because of its complexity (slicing the border image and completely understanding how it's stretched or repeated is painful and too expensive for the result, as designers told me during the dotCSS conference). We can probably easily replace the 'border-image' reset by a warning in the spec with infinitesimal impact on the Web.

For other shorthand properties resetting longhands they don't set: based on the feedback I am collecting, this is not a "moot point" but a major subject of discontentment for CSS authors. In short: we failed because, once again, we ditched editability and maintainability thinking only of browsing and not production, chose the wrong solution. It impacts quite a lot our users' production. Rule #1: don't upset users.
So before declaring things impossible, we should probably study how a change would impact the Web. I'm sure Google can collect interesting metrics for each shorthand/longhand impacted?

</Daniel>

Received on Monday, 4 December 2017 19:49:45 UTC