Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobr | Hacker News Reader

Good reminder that in CSS, darkgray is a light gray and gray is a dark gray. Also presumably up is down and wet is dry.

CSS is just an embarrassment of mistakes:

   white-space: nowrap

So they take a word "whitespace" which needs no hyphen and jam one in. Then they take two completely distinct words "no wrap" and jam them together with no separator. And then you have to remember both of these on the same rule.

Also, the entire semantics are a bit strange. When I'm deciding whether I want text to line wrap, I don't really think about whether the whitespace should wrap. Yes, whitespace is somewhat relevant to the topic, since that's one option of where to break lines in order to line wrap, but I still think of it as the entire text that is line wrapping.

Oh, and don't forget that there is in fact a word-wrap property, which is a much better name for the previous behavior, but in fact only customizes how the line-breaking algorithm determines which words can be broken apart.

The naming is far from great, but there is a method to the madness. Here's a talk I did a while back on how various line breaking things fit together: https://cssday.nl/2019/speakers#florian

This is at the top of the list in the Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS[1]. Which has been discussed several times on HN (last 2 months ago)[2].

1: https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes

2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25891435

"Whitespace" in programming languages is a single word. "White space" in visual arts is composed of two separate words.

Eh it's minor at best. I'll take it over "referer" any day.

I would be so lost if vscode didn't autocomplete css so well for me.

"White space" is two words, not one.

In computing it is widely used as a single word "whitespace." For example:

- The XML W3C Rec: https://www.w3.org/TR/xml/

- The HTTP 1.0 RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945

However, there are exception. The Unicode character database has a property called "White_Space" which implies it is two words: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr44/#White_Space

> a property called "White_Space" which implies it is two words

<tongue-in-cheek> Except that `_` is a "word" character by default. </tongue-in-cheek>

As far as I can tell, both are common, but “white space” is more common as a synonym to negative space, and “whitespace” is more common to refer to the characters. If so, the “white-space” property controls whitespace, not white space.

"White" and "space" are two words, and "Whitespace" is one word.

But 'chucknorris'[0] is still my favorite red.

[0]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911/why-does-html-th...

That's fun. I've coded this useless tool based on your comment: "What's Your HTML Color ?"[0]

[0]: https://onivers.com/color.html

Ah! Maybe useless but cool nonetheless!

This just reminded me of the first bug of my career that took me hours trying to figure out. Colors weren't working correclty in IE 6 (pre IE Developer Tools) and I eventually learned that Firefox accepted both spellings "gray" and "grey", whereas IE only one of them.

Don't remember which one I used, but do remember that I went home early that day after that :/

Fiddle if anyone wants to see them: https://jsfiddle.net/yucsj7a2/1/

'Brown' is dark red, and to my eye 'sienna' has very little red in it. To get actual brown, you need 'saddlebrown'. CSS is super weird.

"Sienna" is an extremely ambiguous color already. Image search for "sienna color" and you'll get a huge range of browns, reds and oranges.

"Burn sienna" seems even more varied. Here's are four different color-oriented websites, with a dark earthy orange from Colorlex [1], a light salmon from Canva [2], a light brown from Benjamin Moore [3] and a dark brown from Atelieracrylic [4].

1. https://colourlex.com/project/burnt-sienna/ 2. https://www.canva.com/colors/color-meanings/burnt-sienna/ 3. https://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/color-overview/find-your... 4. http://atelieracrylic.com/atelier-interactive/burnt-sienna/

Fair enough, but the 'brown' issue is similarly confusing to the lightness reversal between 'gray' and 'darkgray'.

Agree on the brown front, it's a very odd color choice.

Worth watching the Technology Connection video on the colour Brown [1]. It's a strange colour that only really exists when placed in the context of other colours, not something that can really be produced by a pure RGB light source, which explains why the CSS Brown colour looks red.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

I tried to find brown on the slider to see what you’re talking about. Took me ages. Turns out you have to go REALLY red in order to find brown.

Turns out brown is a really interesting color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

Yup. There's a bunch like that.

Know that CSS colors mostly came from X11: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names

The CSS team shares some blame, though: they adopted them (and they really didn't need to: they could have just supported rgb/hsb/lab triplets).

Some background about why dark gray is lighter than gray, plus some other idiosyncrasies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names#Clashes_betwee...

And lavender is definitely not lavender.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reply on news.ycombinator.com