Ajax Girl

Bert Bos, a W3C fellow, thinks that CSS variables are to be considered harmful:

Adding any form of macros or additional scopes and indirections, including symbolic constants, is not just redundant, but changes CSS in ways that make it unsuitable for its intended audience. Given that there is currently no alternative to CSS, these things must not be added.

He has some very compelling points in there, some of which I agree with, and others that I don’t:

This PHP version proves that it is not necessary to add constants to CSS. Just like the existence of the WebKit implementation cannot be taken as proof that constants in CSS are useful, so the PHP implementation cannot prove that either. But the PHP implementation has the benefit of letting authors determine the usefulness for themselves, without modifying CSS on the Web.

You can obviously use pre-processors to do many macro situations. This doesn’t mean that it is the right place for functionality like this. I don’t want to force every CSS request through PHP. I also like having functionality in CSS itself, as that can be shared across projects and developers without “oh, and by the way this looks a little different as we pre-process it with a magic Rails action”. Something as important as variables should be low level IMO.

It is quite likely that somebody who is trying to learn CSS will give up learning it when he sees that style sheets that occur on the Web don’t actually look like the tutorials he started from. Difference in upper- and lowercase or in pretty-printing are hindrances to learning, too, but limited ones: you soon learn to ignore those differences. But symbolic constants are different in each style sheet and have to be interpreted and understood each time anew.

A touch too strong. Things change. Tutorials get out of date. C’est la vie. And, you can always use old form…. and the feature is so simple that it won’t take you weeks to work it out!

People who understand CSS in principle may still have trouble understanding the indirection provided by the em unit, many have trouble with the advanced selectors in level 3, and many more won’t understand, e.g., any of the properties that have to do with bi-directionality or vertical text. For each feature that is added to CSS there must be a careful balance (based on an informed guess, because these things are difficult to test) between the number of users that will be excluded by that feature and the number for whom it is essential that it be added.

I agree in the balance. There are some crazy complicated parts of CSS. However, simple variables is trivial in comparison! Also, I think it will be used a hell of a lot more frequently.

Treating symbolic constants as an independent module would make them available for use in other contexts than CSS, would make them available to precisely the people who need them without hindering other people, would allow them to be developed without impact on CSS, and allow them to be developed more easily into what they are sure to develop into anyway: full macros, able to replace anything, not just CSS values, and able to make files shorter instead of longer.

I agree about modularity. There will be issues with scope and such, and we will have to fight to keep the system as simple as possible.

However, I can’t wait to be able to re-skin something by changing the variables only that represent semantic parts of my application. Search and replace isn’t good enough. Having tools that see the #xxxxxx and show you a color aren’t good enough. You end up reading a lot more CSS than you write, so we should help that use case. I don’t think CSS should become a programming language with if statements and the like, and I doubt this is a gateway drug to that.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/358387784/css-variables-considered-harmful