The attribute brackets

[valtido]

Hi Guys,

I have a question regarding the attributes round brackets...

Why was the decision to use (href="#") as oppose to [href="#"]

I would strongly recommend to use the square brackets as this is most commonly used in CSS selectors, jQuery and other languages use [] to reference the attribute list.

Or at the very list, we could have the option to add that ourselves, or change preferences.

But I strongly believe it only makes sense to support both for the time being, depricate the () introduce the [] and then when a new version is out (a year or so down the the line) remove the ()

Any thoughts on this ?

[lydell]

I asked once (#735), but didn't get an answer to why it was chosen.

[vendethiel]

It's because it's so much easier for french people to type :D.
I guess it's because haml had it.

[ForbesLindesay]

Yes, @visionmedia is right that we definitely don't want two syntaxes for the same thing here. In some ways changing to the [] does seem nicer as it fits with CSS, but it does feel very late to make such a drastic change.

[valtido]

@ForbesLindesay I feel that depricating it now, and removing it 1 year down the line... it's a decent transition...

Or have a fallback if all hell goes loose

[valtido]

@ForbesLindesay so any light on this?

[valtido]

@ForbesLindesay is this question open for discussion ?

[ForbesLindesay]

I think I'm going to leave it out for this release. It's a big change to make this close to the deadline. It is open for discussion for v2.0.0 and could be made in a backwards compatible (mostly) way by just allowing people to use either or (providing they match).

[vendethiel]

-1 for [] because it's harder to type on my keyboard :p (azerty. I find the position of [] on qwerty keyboards pretty bad too, even if I forget often to hold shift to type (), but that's just by habit)

[ForbesLindesay]

I just don't think this change is worthwhile at the moment. Being more like CSS would be kind of nice, but I think it's fine as it is with the minor variation.

[valtido]

I know this ticket is closed... but how about a setting/flag, where a user can override, what they should use [] or ().

Something like a config file, or just like we set app.locals.pretty = true

This is very easy to change the default, and if there is a problem, you can change the flag very easily if you are on the old version.