[css-cascade-4] Add an alias to !important

[francescorn]

css-cascade-4

! is the logical not operator. When adding ! in front of important, it should mean it is not important, as in not taking precedence.

* would make more sense to be in front since it covers all of the elements.

My proposed task would be to:

1. Add an alias for !important such as *important because it is closer to meaning more/most important of all elements.

[Loirooriol]

! is the logical not operator

CSS doesn't have a logical not operator

Add an alias for !important

At this point it doesn't seem feasible to deprecate !important, so adding an alias will just increase confusion IMO.

*important

That's problematic, because that's valid in a <declaration-value>. But a top-level ! is not, so it can act as a delimiter.

In particular, this would break:

document.body.style.cssText = "--foo: bar*important";
document.body.style.getPropertyValue("--foo"); // "bar*important"

[astearns]

It definitely is confusing, and on our list of mistakes.

It might be possible to come up with an alias that works better, but I expect this would need to be a longer keyword instead of adding some special character. And I’d like the new thing to make it more clear how important declarations interact with origins and contexts https://www.w3.org/TR/css-cascade-4/#cascade-origin

[francescorn]

What about mostImportant or moreImportant?

[francescorn]

@fantasai @litherum What are your thoughts on a better alias name?

[litherum]

I’m categorically against aliases.

• They have maintenance cost for implementers
• They don’t offer authors any functionality that they didn’t have before
• The web is the biggest platform in the world. As such, it is totally capable of defining its own conventions.

[Crissov]

Do XML and HTML get the same kind of comments for having <!DOCTYPE and <!--?