The Queen’s stylesheets

While the linguist in me is appalled by the author's joking (hopefully!) prescriptivist notion that British English is equivalent to such a thing as "correct English" (the American in me is also perturbed by such a claim), I'd like to point out that the home page's phrase "amount of features" is considered by such prescriptivists to be incorrect English. :) They would insist on "number of features" :P

Not very many substitutions performed[1]:<p><pre><code> 'colour' =&#62; 'color', 'grey' =&#62; 'gray', '!please' =&#62; '!important', 'transparency' =&#62; 'opacity', 'centre' =&#62; 'center', 'plump' =&#62; 'bold', 'photograph' =&#62; 'image', 'capitalise' =&#62; 'capitalize' </code></pre> Would've thought there'd be a ton of opportunities to pedantically correct CSS's choice of words. !please instead of !important made me laugh, though.<p>[1]: Taken from <a href="https://github.com/idiot/Spiffing/blob/master/spiffing.php" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/idiot/Spiffing/blob/master/spiffing.php</a> (aside, please don't use this project as a good example of PHP code style).

The sound. Oh my goodness, the sound. Why is there not a button to stop it?<p>I was listening to some music in the background with multiple tabs open, and I didn't expect a project link from HN to autoplay music. Confusion ensues.

Love it, reminds me of "If PHP Were British" ( <a href="http://www.addedbytes.com/blog/if-php-were-british/" rel="nofollow">http://www.addedbytes.com/blog/if-php-were-british/</a> )<p>Wouldn't mind a few more substitutions in the language, but it seems like most of the work went into making a really nice landing page. Great job there! (Autoplay music forgivable on a joke at least)

It's amusing, although I'm lost with their proposal of "transparency" over "opacity", since they are opposites and, as far as I know, used on both sides of the Atlantic. Also obtaining the transparency would require applying the transformation x -&#62; 1-x to the opacity.<p>I feel I'm missing something with this example.

Ok, this is only tangentially related, but does anyone know why it's "background-repeat: no-repeat" instead of "none"? Or why it's "text-wrap: none" but "white-space: nowrap" or "white-space: pre-wrap"?

People seem to be taking this a tad seriously. It's a joke, right? (S)he's not actually expecting anyone to change all their css to use some random PHP script just so they can have British spelling and backwards transparency/opacity semantics.

As an Englishman I must say that it really does bother me when people attempt to write or talk in the manner they imagine an English gentleman might. It always feels quite stilted, particularly in the not-quite-correct usage of unnecessarily antiquated vocabulary.

I am going to put this into our development workflow. It totally made my day. Thank you so much! I admit that background music is highly relevant. However, using 'photograph' =&#62; 'image', is not good. I suggest 'picture' =&#62; 'image', since it covers both illustrations and photographs.

I guess we also need ones for other languages<p><pre><code> 透明度: 0.5; 色: 紫; </code></pre> which does bring up the point, are we being at all culturally insensitive by making nearly all web standards English?<p>Or how about UsingCamelCase? Give than some languages don't have the concept of UPPER/lower case.<p>Does Go require you to use "er" for interfaces as in Writer, Reader, Serializer? That seems even worse given that it not just roman letters only it's English only. I don't know other languages but I suspect the suffix 'er' has no meaning in Spanish, Italian, French, and that being forced to added it to classes written using those languages would really suck.<p><pre><code> type Escribirer interface // !?!?</code></pre>

Your example is incorrect<p>"transparency: 1" != "opacity: 1"<p>We use transparency in the US. Transparency is how much light passes through an object and Opacity is how much it blocks.<p>so:<p>"transparency: 1" == "opacity: 0"

Also known as <i>international English.</i> This point can't be stressed enough.

Don't miss the comments in the HTML.

As a Briton I find these kinds of things as offensive as I suppose Americans must find international stereotypes of their country, people and education.

This isn't complete until the shorthand box notation is changed from top, right, bottom, left to top, left, bottom, right.

Smashing! Next order of business: i18n whereby .com becomes .co.us and .co.uk becomes .com?

This is not something that ought to require substitution. It is not beyond the realms of technical possibility to make the parsers accept both "color" and "colour" as correct. Similarly for other common substitution pairs.

It should change all the vendor prefixes too:<p><pre><code> border-radius-for-all border-radius-for-Webkit border-radius-for-Opera border-radius-for-Firefox </code></pre> And maybe @summons instead of @import.

This would be awesome if I could use LESS and not open myself to a possible LFI.

If any Rubists want to play with it, I wrote a gem for it: <a href="https://github.com/muan/spiffing" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/muan/spiffing</a> :)

Autoplay music had me cracking up. How can you people actually criticize it of all things for what is so clearly a joke?

I am quite sure I'm not the only one that read the text with a brit accent in my mind.

Music starts playing automatically, quickly closed window.

auto playing music on the web is a bit 90s no?

Ew autoplay music. What is this, Geocities?

The bowler tilts upon rollover. Nice touch.

Does transparency: 0.1; -&#62; opacity: 0.9;<p>Because it should.

Autoplay music? Are you kidding me?

TURN OFF THE MUSIC DAMNIT