Create an `alt` stylesheet
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Discussion on Issue #48 reminded me of something @mirisuzanne and I were discussing a few weeks ago. We settled on having two different [kinds of] stylesheets in Remedy — clearly marking the code we think will help every (new) website ever. And code that might help your particular website, but you should read it, pick through it, and manually add just the things that will help for you.
Why?
The CSS Working Group has two constraints when creating new CSS / Browsers have two constraints when adding new CSS.
- The change to CSS itself must not break existing websites.
- The new defaults must work for every website ever. Every script. Every language. Every writing mode. Every weird edge case or bug.
Remedy does not have the first constraint. We aren't changing the browser. We are offering a better starting place for new sites / new codebases. If an Author wants to throw Remedy at an existing pile of CSS, then it's up to them to QA test and make sure they aren't breaking anything.
It's tempting to blow off the second constraint. Many of us who write CSS as a front-end developer live with this reality all the time. If I'm building a site that hosts user-generated content, I don't know what kinds of content people might be making.... but I do make some assumptions and support 80% of usecases. Maybe 90%. I don't worry about the extremely rare case. I don't have time. So I may not test my comment section for every language, or every weird combination of characters. It's likely my boss would rather live with a bug or two than run up the budget.
But with Remedy, there's a chance this project will get picked up by very popular themes/frameworks/starter-kits, and will be used for a large global audience. We don't want to write code that only works sometimes.
So here's a solution, so that we can provide hints and help that'll work 80% of the time... while not leaving out the 20%.
Let's create two stylesheets — the main Remedy stylesheet will only have code that always works all the time for everything. And there'll be an "Alt" stylesheet that invites people to read it, and move over any code that will work for them.
Options for sub and sup can be one such example in the Alt stylesheet. Include documentation (comments in the code) that explains why this is good, wand why it might be a problem. Empower the author to decide for themselves. Encourage people fork Remedy and make it their own, customizing it for their project. And then encourage the Bootstraps and Wordpress projects of the world to never include any of the Alt code by default. Just the main code. Alt can be passed along to the developers of each site to read through it.
Let's use this as a meta (for now) to list what bits of code should go into the Alt stylesheet.
I'll start with Issue #48