Mental Meltdown Mayhem.

[swestrup]

There is a point beyond which overtiredness ceases to cause creativity and verges on madness. I'm now reaching that point:

• I was tryiing to imagine how a Klingon would deal with something, and I ended up channeling Sweet'ums instead. "Sweet'ums like gak. Yes. Oh, yes. Sweet'ums do. Yes... Q'apla"
• And I just realized that I was using Strong Bad's voice when I was mentally composing the above just now...
  
• I've figured out that if you try to turn your Penguin up to 11, and it starts smoking and buzzing around 10.5, it may be a good idea to stop right there.
• I was trying to figure out how to fix the design of CSS and decided it needed something like C++'s template system.

I think I should attempt to sleep now, while I still can realize how bad most of these ideas were.

Comments

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

Wow, C++ templates for CSS. Yeah, that'll "fix it", I'm sure...

[swestrup]

Well, I found myself typing all of these CSS ... thingies (terminology failure: what do you call a selector-and-brace-block?) like:

#leftcolumn
  { float: left; 
    border-left: 1px solid white; 
    width: 20em; 
    background-color: green; 
    color: white;
  }

#rightcolumn
  { float: right;
    border-right: 1px solid white; 
    width: 20em; 
    background-color: green; 
    color: white;
  }

and I started thinking that what I really want to type is more along the lines of:

$columnsizes
  { width: 20em; 
    border-width: 1px; 
    border-enable: 0; 
  }

$columncolors
  { border-color: white; 
    background-color: green; 
    color: white; 
  }

Template $column<side>:$columncolors,$columnsizes #<side>column
  { float: <side>; 
    border-<side>-enable: 1 
  }

$column<left>;
$column<right>;

So that I could explictly inherit color and size information from other rules (thus only having to define my colors and sizes ONCE.) and so I could parameterize the creation of rules. (You'll note I had to create a new border-enable property to make this kind of inheritance work. You'd need a bunch of things like that, I fear.)

Anyway, I did say I was on the brink of madness when it occured to me.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

You'd think some of this "cascading" thing would be of some use...

[swestrup]

Yeah, you'd think so.