[css-color-4] Alias "grey()" to "gray()"?

[jhpratt]

Relevant section

As far as I'm aware, anywhere "gray" is used in CSS, "grey" is treated identically. Will level 4 colors no longer follow this, or was it an oversight?

[tabatkins]

The gray/grey duplication was a property of the X11 colors that CSS took wholesale; it wasn't an intentional decision on anyone's part. (Take a look at Alex Sexton's talk about the history of these colors!)

The 'grey' spelling is a British (and ex-empire in generally) spelling; CSS uses American spelling, and we don't generally add British spelling aliases. (See the perennial request for a colour alias. ^_^)

[jhpratt]

@tabatkins I had forgotten about the merging of colors. However, I feel as though people have come to expect gray and grey to work identically in all situations, as that's how it's been historically.

[svgeesus]

The aliasing of international-English grey and US-English gray is least problematic as a property value (but would probably still not be adopted, were those keywords to be proposed today). As a functional notation, it would be more problematic; it would require precedence and de-duplicating rules in case both were specified. Even more so for aliasing the color property to colour (and the same for all the *-color* properties.

Sorry, this would add far more issues than it solves.

[HerrBertling]

Well, there's always https://github.com/hashanp/postcss-spiffing if someone really, really wants to use British English 😄 ^{I know this is not helping the discussion, but I just could not resist}

[tomhodgins]

Maybe an explanation about greyvs gray, or color vs colour would be good to add to one of these pages:

• https://wiki.csswg.org/faq
• https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes

As a Canadian who teaches people HTML/CSS, the 'u' absent from color is an issue every single learner seems to stumble over at first because it doesn't appear wrong to them. It would be wonderful to have an official acknowledgement somewhere like these pages that's easy to point to and show people, as well as find if they're searching for it that explains why it's named the way it is and that US english is the standard for all CSS terminology.

[Sainan]

The aliasing of international-English grey and US-English gray is least problematic as a property value (but would probably still not be adopted, were those keywords to be proposed today). As a functional notation, it would be more problematic; it would require precedence and de-duplicating rules in case both were specified. Even more so for aliasing the color property to colour (and the same for all the *-color* properties.

Sorry, this would add far more issues than it solves.

I don't see how duplicate properties would be problematic or require any rules at all. Consider the following 'problematic' example:

color: red;
colour: green;

This is not any more problematic than this:

color: red;
color: green;

In fact, they're semantically identical (at least in my ideal world where CSS supports this).

Or, if you wanna continue on with your current "American English is all that matters" leitmotif, you can say that color has higher precedence. 🙃

[svgeesus]

It would be wonderful to have an official acknowledgement somewhere like these pages that's easy to point to and show people, as well as find if they're searching for it that explains why it's named the way it is and that US english is the standard for all CSS terminology.

W3C uses U.S. English (e.g., "standardise" should read "standardize" and "behaviour" should read "behavior").
W3C Manual of Style, Spelling

[Sainan]

Hello, here's your annual reminder that American English is not the only English dialect. Still looking forward for CSS to support colour, background-colour, etc. in a future standards version! :)

[svgeesus]

Your question has already been answered. Please stop spamming this closed issue.

[Sainan]

Just because documents themselves should be written in American English doesn't mean that you can't introduce non-American English tokens as valid syntax.

[tabatkins]

It does, however, mean that APIs do default to American English spelling, and the web platform does not as a rule introduce duplicates like this without very good reason. Introducing it purely in CSS would be inconsistent with the rest of the web. (British/Canadian English aren't the only variant Englishes, either.)

The CSSWG designs its APIs in American English, like DOM, JS, and the rest of the web platform does. We do not plan on changing that, and spamming requests will escalate to a ToC violation after you've been warned. I'm locking this issue for now; nothing else needs to be said here.