[css-values] How does `ident()` handle strings?

[Loirooriol]

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values-5/#ident

can be used to manually construct <custom-ident> values from several parts.

Well, the spec doesn't define how. If these parts are <ident> then I'm inferring from the examples that they are just concatenated.

But for <string> it's less clear. E.g. what is ident(" a ")?

• The ident a, i.e. the result of parsing the value of the string as an <ident>
• The ident \ a\ , i.e. an ident that has the same codepoints as the string (possibly escaped depending on [css-values] Are the codepoints in an indentifier stored in escaped form or not? #12982)

[tabatkins]

It's definitely the latter, unless we specifically and intentionally add text saying that the string is stripped first. (Which I don't think we should do.) "a a" is definitely valid as well, after all, and equivalent to the ident a\ a.