11–20 of 24 posts
take a look at LESS CSS. It does exactly this and more. http://lesscss.org/
Here's a totally silly example, but you can see the power:
color-if-hidden(color)
if @display == none
color: color
.hello
display: none
color-if-hidden(red)take a look at LESS CSS. It does exactly this and more. http://lesscss.org/
This will allow never ending loops (two of these can @when each other) - css is not an imperative language that works from top to bottom, it's more of a state language where certain items override other. If you add this, the language will become turing complete, and then you'll have people disabling css just like they disable javascript. If you want this, you'll need to find a syntax that makes it impossible for css…
I am well aware of the arguments for DSLs being not Turing Complete and agree with them entirely and wholeheartedly. At the same time, I look at CSS and the strain of it "wanting" to be Turing Complete is becoming so, so noticeable, and what's worse than making a DSL unnecessarily Turing Complete is a DSL that wants to be Turing Complete, and instead of being carefully designed for that purpose gets it accidentally hacked in due to feature creep. (See also: SQL stored procedures, UNIX shell, make, XUL and a number of the declarative UIs that embed too much in the declaration that can't be easily worked with in code.)
Personally I'm coming around to the abstract "right answer" being to scrap CSS and just let JS do it all, letting some people put together some jQuery-like wrappers to make it easy and nice. I understand this will Never Happen (TM), but as CSS grows more and more "features" in the direction of TCness we're getting to the point where what we actually have is isomorphic to that, only much more complicated and impossible to work with.
This will allow never ending loops (two of these can @when each other) - css is not an imperative language that works from top to bottom, it's more of a state language where certain items override other. If you add this, the language will become turing complete, and then you'll have people disabling css just like they disable javascript. If you want this, you'll need to find a syntax that makes it impossible for css…
If the proposed extension was the only change, and the language remained otherwise declarative, then any mutually-dependent if statements could be easily detected by the implementation (e.g. by constructing an expression graph) and either ignored or interpreted as always true or always false. Excel and other spreadsheet apps already include support for if expressions, and they remain purely declarative.
Having said all this, I think that great care should be taken when considering additions like this to CSS, since it could complicate implementations significantly and may lead to poor performance. All of this can be achieved using javascript, so I don't see why you couldn't just write a javascript library instead. jQuery is an example of this approach, which has proved very popular and hasn't required any changes in standards or browsers.
This will allow never ending loops (two of these can @when each other) - css is not an imperative language that works from top to bottom, it's more of a state language where certain items override other. If you add this, the language will become turing complete, and then you'll have people disabling css just like they disable javascript. If you want this, you'll need to find a syntax that makes it impossible for css…
This will allow never ending loops (two of these can @when each other) - css is not an imperative language that works from top to bottom, it's more of a state language where certain items override other. If you add this, the language will become turing complete, and then you'll have people disabling css just like they disable javascript. If you want this, you'll need to find a syntax that makes it impossible for css…
Media queries already kind of does this. "When screen max width is larger than xxx. Do this ..."
This idea is a extension where we can check for more than viewport width and height.