Space shorthands

[robb-j]

Alembic could have global shorthands that any element could use if it wanted, the first example would be to make "scale" variables easier to use in layouts.

e.g. space="s1" rather than space="var(--s1)".

A human-friendly convention here makes sense, though it should be properly thought-out. Some ideas that come to mind:

• Just numbers for spacing — 1
• Prefixed with "s" — s4
• Function style — space(1)
• Variable style — --s1

These mappings could be held in a central place so they can be accessed by any custom element and promote consistency, so each component doesn't have to implement the logic itself.

const shorthands = {
  's-5': 'var(--s-5)',
  // ...
  's0': 'var(--s)',
  // ...
  's4': 'var(--s4)',
  's5': 'var(--s5)'
}

It might be interesting to open these up to alembic consumers so they can add their own shorthands or replace them?

An offshoot of this idea is a set of flags to pass to alembic, like feature flags:

const flags = {
  experimental: {
    spaceShorthands: true
  }
}