Comments on: Regex Matching Attribute Selectors

By: Stormrider

Stormrider — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:00:55 +0000

Why not?

By: ctx2002

ctx2002 — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 03:46:50 +0000

what next , add if , else, while loop into css?

By: ETbyrne

ETbyrne — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 00:20:23 +0000

You can already do that easily with PHP. I have to admit I like the concept though.

By: Stormrider

Stormrider — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:59:36 +0000

but in the end, I agree with the W3C, this is a bit more programming/logic than it is presentation

These are different things though. The end result is that the CSS controls the presentation, but this has no bearing on what should be able to be done within the stylesheet as well. Why can’t you have more advanced programming in a stylesheet? Its still all only about the styles.

I just never understand this argument at all.

By: Toby Somerville

Toby Somerville — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:14:47 +0000

@Stormrider – It would be great to be able to use variables and perhaps even pass them in the query string.

One other thing I’d love to see a declaration that removed all styling. Something like:

body{
style: remove;
}

That way you wouldn’t have to reset all the properties if you wanted to start from a “clean sheet”.

By: envisean

envisean — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:27:23 +0000

@James,

I really think this is overall a great idea, but I can also see how it can have its flaws. This could only apply to a global fixed-width image for menu items, and many times people will have variable width elements (yes, this could be tweaked with a dom:loaded js iterator). This could also break the technique of matrix menus as well. I think this is an interesting use-case where this could definitely save time and CSS-sanity, but in the end, I agree with the W3C, this is a bit more programming/logic than it is presentation. Although, I would love something like to clean up CSS code :)

By: Stormrider

Stormrider — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:30:52 +0000

This would be fantastic. I remember one of the reasons they haven’t implemented variables in CSS yet is something to do with CSS being about the styles only, and introducing variables would be outside the scope of the language or something, which I find a bit silly really. The purpose of the language is still about styles, it just means instead of repeating declarations everywhere for colour, you can set it once at the top and use variables down below, for even easier updating of styles – or set padding/margin values which are used in several places (as they often are).

I think CSS needs to evolve a bit to include things like this, and variables, and it would be great to see them and create an even better way of applying styles. It would save on lots of bandwidth as well, make things more compact and scalable as well.

By: brothercake

brothercake — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:24:57 +0000

@Sergeant Rock – yeah CSS3 has some substring-matching selectors, and they’re implemented in all recent browsers (Firefox 2+, Opera 9+, Safari 3+).

But like you say, they’re not regexes, they’re limited to known substrings. But it was the potential for backreferences that most interested me in this idea.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:12:42 +0000

Imagine indeed… taking output from a CMS (e.g. a list of pages), giving the element an ID value based on the value of the outputted text, passing through the value to the stylesheet then having the background image be the URL to a server-side script that outputs an image based on the querystring which contains that text value…. maybe thats taking it a bit too far!

By: Ahmad Alfy

Ahmad Alfy — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:13:09 +0000

Does it validate?