Intent to Experiment for Longer
- Published on:
- Categories:
- CSS 65
- Current music:
- Ann Annie — By Morning
- Current drink:
- Peppermint Tea
Today, Chrome published two “intents to ship”: for the new CSS if() function, and for custom CSS functions.
I informally object to this.
Intent to prototype the if() function was less than a month ago. Its TAG review has no resolution.
Intent to prototype custom functions was a year ago, and while there was some prototyping at the time, the new version of what is currently in Canary was started only in the last month. Its TAG review has no resolution as well.
Given how foundational and crucial these features are — I would strongly recommend Google to re-think how they’re planning to ship these features.
Just last year we had a situation where anchor positioning was shipped prematurely, with very substantial changes to its syntax later based on the later feedback. And this was after the feature was in a prototype stage for much longer than both if() and custom functions.
The absense of open issues in CSSWG for these features cannot be taken as a signal that they are ready to ship: authors just started to play with them, and I am not sure engineers and CSSWG members from other browsers had a chance to take an in-depth look into the specs and play with the prototypes just yet.
I am very biased: I want these features more than many others. My first article about “Conditions for CSS Variables” was in 2016.
In 2023 and 2024 I published four articles about various ways we could write conditional CSS, prototyping conditions, functions and mixins:
- “Cyclic Dependency Space Toggles”
- “Scroll-Driven State Transfer”
- “Layered Toggles: Optional CSS Mixins”
- “Indirect Cyclic Conditions: Prototyping Parametrized CSS Mixins”
For a few years, from around 2013 to 2016, I was also a maintainer of the Stylus CSS preprocessor. I wanted conditions, functions, and mixins for a long, long time.
And yet, I don’t want them to ship in Chrome — not right now.
I want these features to be in their perfect form when they ship. Maybe not complete — but one where we’re all certain that what we have will not change, and will be future-proof.
Just a month since the prototype to shipping the features is many months too soon. I just had a bit of time to play with them. The feedback that I have is already brewing in me, but I’ll need more time to express it properly. Other authors, I am pretty sure, will need this time too.
If Chrome is to ship these features in their stable browser versions — at the very least — do so under a feature flag that is disabled by default. Let authors play with the features, let other browsers to look into them and consider various use cases, let the Web Platform take a few breaths — and then think about shipping the features for real.
Please. Let us experiment with these features for longer.