Hacker News Reader

Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

I wish there were a revolt against W3C. They have consistently made a mess of everything they touch (and take forever to do it). Why reinvent the wheel yet again with another fuglier syntax? We already have Sass and LESS which are widely used and quite beloved. Just adopt the best of those and save us from yet another "XSL-FO". Please! For God's sake, man!

View on HN

That's a case of assuming the worst without knowing the decisions that went into the spec. The idea of using a simple `$` syntax for variables came up and was discussed but was eventually rejected. If I recall right it was rejected because they thought they might want to use it for a separate feature in the future. And they thought the function syntax better fit in with the rest of CSS (which uses functions a lot) anyways.

I know I used to think the var syntax was incredibly ugly, but I have to say after using it for a while now, you actually get used to it.

But read through the CSSWG mailing lists and you'll gain a lot more respect back for the decisions they make.

So, in your world, we'd all have to compile our stylesheets? I don't like that idea at all.

No. The reason sass or less require compiling is to support features that aren't actually a part of the CSS standard, so they need to be compiled down to things that are a part of the css standard.

In his world, the best of those features would be part of the CSS standard and supported by browsers, so you could just give them right to browsers without compiling anything.

Well I'm glad I phrased it as a question then :)

> Just adopt the best of those

You say that like everyone agrees on what "the best" is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com