CSS Variables: Coming Soon to a Browser Near You
Ever wished you could use variables in your stylesheets? Well, what may be the number one most requested feature for the next generation of CSS, finally has a formal proposal. The spec, put forth by Apple’s David Hyatt and and Daniel Glazman of Disruptive Innovations, would allow web designers to use variables in stylesheets.
For those that have never considered the idea, here’s why variables would be so useful: imagine you have a common font-color declaration that you apply to all sorts of elements in your stylesheet; using a variable you could define the color once, making it much easier to change in the future. Instead of hunting through your stylesheet looking for every place you used that color, you could just change one line of code to update every element that uses that variable.
Even better is this line from the proposed spec:
The definitions of variables should cross @import boundaries so variables can be contained in a standalone stylesheet and imported by all stylesheets needing them.
Which means that you could keep your variables in an entirely separate file and when you wanted to make a site-wide change, you’d just need to update the one file.
For now CSS variables are just a proposal and may undergo significant rewrites before they find their way into browsers. But given that David Hyatt, one of the key developers of Apple’s Safari browser, is one of the authors, we wouldn’t be surprised to see experimental support for variables turn up in a future Safari update.
[via Simon Willison]
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