
A PostCSS plugin for people who prefer to write English properly - janpot
https://github.com/jevakallio/css-properly
======
afandian
There is a sweet spot to being the languge underdog. In the UK we've borrowed
'program', 'dialog', 'analog', 'disk' etc for computers, but retain the
British for non-computer uses. And, amusingly, we can tell the difference
between 'router' and 'router' by pronounciation.

It seems software has become far more prescriptive of late. Although had
autocorrect in Word 97(?) and smartphones, recently MacOS and Google have been
aggressively rewriting text as you type. It's gone from "did you mean the
American version?" to "I've changed it, don't worry". And not everyone has the
wherewithal to configure their locale properly.

I see this as a significant form of cultural erasure over the coming years.
Given what we've forced on the world historically, I don't think the UK can
complain! But it's interesting to observe.

~~~
mikro2nd
And, not content with US vs. Brit spellings, my Android phone's autocorrect
stubbornly and insistently _refuses_ to spell "fuck", even when I tap the word
out a letter at a time. Instead it insists I meant "duck". Imposing American
Puritan moralistic filters on my use of the language,... whatever next?

~~~
julianlam
Have you tried adding the word to the keyboard dictionary?

~~~
capableweb
One would think that a very common word would already been added to the
dictionary, and not require the users to enter it to their own dictionary. I'm
pretty sure "fuck" is in every major dictionary as well, so why the fuck not
in the phone dictionary?

~~~
WorldMaker
Because phones are still sold to adults that "think of the children" and
decided the easiest way to stop swearing is to pretend it doesn't exist.

------
smoe
This reminded me, when in the beginning of my career in the mid 2000s I spent
hours trying to figure out why some css did not seem to get applied in IE6
(Well trying to figure out why x didn't work in IE6 was what people were doing
30%+ of their time in web application development back then)

In this case it turned out to be that I was using "grey" for a color which
worked perfectly fine in Firefox, but Internet Explorer only knew about the US
spelling "gray" so it just ignored my declarations.

I haven't used css color names since.

------
benjaminjosephw
This is really funny but also practically helpful. My muscle memory for words
like colour and centre is so strong that I have to pause whenever I write them
to make sure I'm using the right spelling in the right context.

On a related note, I was on a website owned by a German company the other day
that used ReCAPTCHA which asked me to identify all the images that include a
"crosswalk". The right answer was clear from context but the assumption that I
would know the answer was a little worrying.

As a British person I'm glad I occasionally rub up against the colonial
attitude of Americans on the internet. It reminds me to think a little more
about the cultural assumptions I'm making embedded in what I create.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I had that recaptcha also, I am in Denmark, I missed the first one not because
it was unclear but because I have bad vision and didn't have glasses with me
and one of the crosswalks was partially obscured so I wasn't sure if there
actually was a crosswalk there. I thought there was but couldn't really see it
so I said no. Then I had to answer 3-4 other captchas to get through after
messing the first one up - the last one was another crosswalk question.

------
gpmcadam
Is this the perpetual meme that will never die?

[https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-
british/](https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/)

~~~
C1sc0cat
Ironically the APPLE ][ used to have this some keywords where changed between
UK and US version - or at least that's what my aging memory tells me

------
mattigames
Ouh disappointing, I was expecting a transpiled CSS alternative that reads as
English, eg.

    
    
        When touch screen is bigger than 600px:
            Paint class important-button:
                - red background
                - solid 1 pixel white border

------
andybak
At the risk of being sent to the tower - I've caved in on -ise/-ize and the
former looks wrong to me now. And I'm on the fence about center/centre.

Color/Colour however. No, not now, not ever...

~~~
coxmichael
In the UK, the -ize spelling is generally attributed to "Americanization", but
it’s actually more etymologically correct even for British English.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_spelling)
(It goes back as far as Shakespeare!)

------
kibibu
I prefer Oxford spelling. Why bother having Z if you can't use it?

~~~
afandian
The 'z' is there so you can press cmd-z to undo whenever you press a 'z'.

------
Epskampie
> padding-ton padding-top When you're thinking of your favourite bear

:-D

------
TeMPOraL
Shouldn't it be called PoshCSS? :).

------
bjoli
Oh, but where is the LICENCE file?

~~~
afandian
Today I learned that American English uses the same spelling for the noun
'licence' and the verb 'license'.

If you think it's odd that we distinguish in British English, what about
'advice' and 'advise'. I think Americans still retain the two spellings?

~~~
bjoli
English is not my first language, and in school we were taught British
English. However, most English language culture I consumed was American. I
have given up speaking anything but franken-english.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Same here. To this day I wonder why are we teaching people British English?
It's not like my country is somehow beholden to the Queen, and the only
English anyone here will experience outside school setting is American.

~~~
vinay427
I'm not sure where your country is but at least in Europe, I think British
English is more commonly taught because people are (thought to be) more likely
to move to the UK/Ireland or interact with Britons/the Irish so BrE is
marginally more applicable. I'm not sure that's actually true with the
population differences at play.

Also, at least in a few countries what more often seems to affect the
curriculum is where one's teacher is from or was trained. I don't know how
widely true that is.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I can buy the "where the teacher was trained" argument. Though if so, then
there's also a huge inertia, because a growing number of teachers,
particularly in private English schools, is from my generation (~30-ish
people), and we grew up in thoroughly Americanized world.

I don't buy the "move to UK/Ireland" justification. Someone knowing American
English will handle the UK perfectly fine (the two dialects aren't _that_
different). But only so many people travel or move to the UK; meanwhile,
almost everyone in Europe is living thoroughly immersed in American culture
and language - in movies, songs, books, technology, social media. From
practical and economical POV, American English is a better choice.

------
fastball
Now I want one that takes Webster's improvements to English further, and
substitutes things like "through" with "thru".

Not that "through" is in a css property that I know, but I just want English
to be phonetic.

~~~
Veen
juː kɑːnt gɛt ə ˈtruːli fəʊˈnɛtɪk ˈɪŋglɪʃ baɪ ˈʧeɪnʤɪŋ ə fjuː ˈspɛlɪŋz. ði
ˈælfəbɪt ˈɪznt ʌp tuː ɪt.

------
SevereOverfl0w
There was one of these many years ago as well
[https://github.com/HashanP/postcss-
spiffing](https://github.com/HashanP/postcss-spiffing)

I think spiffing has a few more pieces in it.

~~~
hjek
I love the !important → !please. I've been corrected many times by Brits for
using _yankeeisms_ but is 'opacity' really one of them?

------
rstlney
I always have to wonder about (former?) colonial countries that still want to
dictate what "proper" forms of their language are. It's a British English
plugin.

------
notadev
This could be applied as an anti-forensic countermeasure to something like
"speech pattern analysis".

------
swyx
I could've sworn that there was an effort to insert British equivalents in
CSS. what happened to it?

------
napolux
Much like [https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-
british/](https://aloneonahill.com/blog/if-php-were-british/)

------
Zealotux
>padding-ton

Count me in.

------
luckgvolina
haha, i like this

------
alienspaces
Yes please!

------
scandox
The mistake here is equating English with the set of symbols borrowed from the
English language for the purpose of creating a new language.

I like British spelling but this is surely a pernicious additional layer of
transformation.

~~~
have_faith
It's just a joke.

~~~
KitDuncan
Should be obvious, especially with `padding-ton`

~~~
Hamuko
And if that's not enough, there's also z-index.

~~~
indentit
I've never even considered before that some people might pronounce it "zee
index" \- do they really, or is that also part of the joke?

