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Comment by James0x57 | Hacker News Reader

YEP! Absolutely nailed it. That's what's up! I've been calling it Space Toggle. It does all kinds of stuff beyond toggle though - the whole world of conditional logic is possible. You can combine them in any way, &&, ||, !, it's all possible.

You can see some more of my examples here: https://twitter.com/James0x57/status/1283912525248069632 https://twitter.com/James0x57/status/1283596399196680192 https://twitter.com/James0x57/status/1282303255826046977

The second version of augmented-ui is packed to the brim with it, I've been working on it for months :D

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Can I ask, what’s the reason for using the keyword “initial”? As I understand it it could be any string that doesn’t accidentally create a valid value?

I was playing around with this here: https://jsbin.com/zebipenidi/1/edit and tried editing the keyword to other things.

When I tried other strings (my name, "null", other CSS "words" like opacity) it broke.

I wonder if this is because the initial variable definition needs to be valid css in order to be replaced?

The OP tweet this about it [0], which links to the CSS spec [1]. It seems like a variable defined as initial triggers a different behavior than a traditional "syntax" error.

[0] https://twitter.com/James0x57/status/1283909866915074048

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/css-variables-1/#invalid-variables

This is really cool. How did you come up with this technique?

Thanks! :D I wanted really badly to be able to do it, so I read the spec very carefully top to bottom a handful of times. And suddenly one day I just realized it. Dove right in and after a bit of progress, I discovered all the logic that was possible too.

I had already been using spaces as a fallback value to do dynamic composition of standard properties ( https://twitter.com/James0x57/status/1233246818118533120 ) so it wasn't too far off to combine it with the "initial" behavior that causes the entire var dependency tree to evaluate to initial, allowing fallback behavior from any point in the tree. :)

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