Identifiers vs. strings

[Matthew Phillips]

Corset treats identifiers and strings as interchangeable. The only difference is what characters are allowed; identifiers only allow [a-zA-Z] (note this is probably not to CSS spec and should be fixed).

The use case here is aesthetics and the belief that there wouldn't be builtin identifiers in Corset.

button {
  event: click var(--increment);
}

vs.

button {
  event: "click" var(--increment);
}

---

However, @propjockey provided a reason for why we might want builtin identifiers. This would be nice:

.profile:not(.editing) {
  text: initial;
}

I think there's a choice here of one of these:

1. Force using strings where identifiers are used now.
   • Maybe this would be more intuitive anyways?
2. Have reserved words like initial but otherwise allow identifiers as strings.
   • Hard to predict ahead of time what we need to reserve.
3. Keep identifiers as strings and use functions for things like initial. initial().
   • Might be unexpected coming from CSS.
4. Allow identifiers as strings only in certain properties. For example could we allow them as the event name, without allowing them generally?

[Matthew Phillips]

This is no longer necessary. I discovered that CSS itself has <custom-ident> (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/custom-ident) and it is more prevalent than I realized. That means that special identifiers for things like initial are ok; you can always use a string if you want the string value.