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Comment by krainboltgreene | Hacker News Reader

The shortening of properties is very much a bad idea and should be avoided. "What the hell is `mb`?" is going to come up a lot.

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I first encountered this with tachyons. It takes some getting used to, but it winds up feeling alright once you do. Maybe that’s just for folks who like fewer keystrokes, though. Admittedly, it’s not the easiest thing to approach cold.

I think it's a very short hump to overcome, and then you're just rolling with Tachyons.

I’d agree. I can see how it isn’t for everyone. But I like typing fewer characters when there’s a system behind it. :)

I'd agree too. For those who are turned off by the looks of it, you should give a try. Read some experience reports here: https://medium.com/@cole_peters/building-and-shipping-functi... and https://hackernoon.com/full-re-write-with-tachyons-and-funct...

In fairness the code is live-editable and so you can figure out what it means by changing it and seeing how the output differs. (mb means margin bottom).

Is there any reason to use shorthand like mb instead of using the React standard marginBottom?

FWIW, marginBottom is not a React "standard", it's a DOM getter on the style object:

    document.body.style.marginTop = '200px'

The non-camel-case version works as well (in modern browsers, there was a time when browsers supported either one or the other):

    document.body.style['margin-top'] = '400px'

A legacy production application is not live-editable in the same way.

I still don't know what `my` means.

A little trial and error, and I think I figured it out:

- m = margin on all sides

- mt = margin top

- mb = margin bottom

- ml = margin left

- mr = margin right

- mx = margin on x axis (left & right)

- my = margin on y axis (top & bottom)

I'd really like to understand why -3 for such an innocuous comment. Live-editable code is an important tool for just this reason.

Guessing you got downvoted because it's not really relevant - live editable code is nice for docs but doesn't explain why a property is poorly named.

I understood the OP as saying they couldn't figure out what "mb" meant because the author didn't define it in the text. I noted that there was another path to figuring out what it meant, by changing the live-editable code and seeing what it does.

Having a live-editable example is certainly nice, but you shouldn't have to fiddle around with a parameter to see what it does. It should be clearly documented so that you know what to expect and what the intention is. Otherwise, the behavior that you observe could be a bug for all you know.

Its also useless for discoverability. Sure, you might be able to figure out some code you read in an example through trial and error, but you won't learn what's actually available.

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