inconsequence
musings on subjects of passing interest
CSS.registerProperty and @property considered harmful
I recently discovered what looked like a cool new feature in CSS. After working on leveraging it to make CSS variables work even better with xinjs's css library I realized it's actually a complete disaster and must be avoided at all costs.
Oops.
Here's what I've written covering this matter in the xins documentation:
@property and CSS.registerProperty() considered harmful
This new CSS feature is well-intentioned but ill-considered. I advise against using it yourself until its serious flaws are addressed. The problem is that if someone registers a variable you're using or you register a variable someone else is using then your CSS may be broken. And you can't re-register a variable either.
This is a bit like the problem that xinjs
Componentworks around with tagNames, but in practice far more difficult to solve. It is impossible to tell if a given instance of a given variable name is an intentional reuse (probably) or a new separate variable. No-one intentionally defines two different components with the same tag.
In a nutshell, instead of making CSS variables more dependable, it makes them inherently fragile and there's no real workaround except for generating all properties via a single javascript library throws fits if anyone does the wrong thing. You can't know if a third party library will break your code or you will break its. It's horrible.
— Tonio Loewald, 6/27/2025
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