CSS is about rules, selectors and cascading, hence Css.
Abstractions matter, and using procedural programming abstractions on a declarative styling language only gets in your way.
Writing CSS is not programming.
It's just not one based on states, mutability, and variables. Even the things that use the `var` keyword are constants, not variables.
(But then, don't read that as being against scoped rules. The fact that all rules are global to the document is bad. We can emulate scopes with specific selectors, but that's the kind of thing a language is supposed to help with.)
Constants which you can redefine/shadow in scopes, and change the values of at runtime via JS.
They seem like variables to me.
No, you can't. You can set a new value and reevaluate everything.
elem.style.setProperty(‘—var-name’, newValue);
To me, that justifies the name “variable” from the perspective of the CSS.
We've heard that one before, haven't we? HTML was supposed to be a declarative language, not a vanilla programming one. And look where we are... the biggest mess of a programming language the world has ever seen.
What's the wisdom of randomly inserting cutesy "declarative" bits in a world infused with programming-oriented infrastructure... It doesn't make any sense.
HTML5 doesn't refer specifically to HTML, rather it's "HTML + JavaScript + CSS". There's hardly a website nowadays that can be used without JS.
By using the name HTML5 as an umbrella name for a programming language API plus some declarative bits, the W3C tacitly admitted that the declarative push has been a mistake - I explained "why" in my previous comment.
The fact is, JavaScript is ubiquitous in web programing and the web is unthinkable without it, it's so pervasive on the front end that it's been repurposed for backend use precisely because it makes a lot of sense to use one programming language for one project. Pure HTML is unsuitable for backend use and it sticks like a sore thumb in the front end.
Younger developers are likely missing on the history of the entire web endeavor but in order to get a feel for it, I'd recommend to focus on practical meaning rather than on trivial semantics.
The big point I was driving at is this: The damage has been done, instead of a clean rendering API we've got this hybrid monstrosity which locked us to a couple / triple browser rendering engines which, due to cutesy BS, are complex beyond comprehension, beyond security analysis or normal competition. This is what an obsession with fancy names leads to.
Granted, when you add CSS to the mix, HTML+CSS is programming if you get fancy about it.
It's our fault we pack all the rules in one file and ship it to all our pages.
"Shadowing" is on purpose it's the cascading part of the cascading style sheets. There are rules around which rule has priority read about selector specificity.