Need to have alias field for CSS features

[OnkarRuikar]

For example, the font-stretch property was renamed to font-width. No browser has updated this change. So we have to keep font-stretch page in the docs. Is there any way to reach font-width syntax using font-stretch as input?

Can we add alias property to the CSS features? For example, in this case, add "aliases: ['font-stretch']", to the font-width definition:

webref/tr/css/css-fonts.json

Lines 77 to 87 in 2442154

	"name": "font-width",
	"href": "https://www.w3.org/TR/css-fonts-4/#propdef-font-width",
	"value": "normal | <percentage [0,∞]> | ultra-condensed | extra-condensed | condensed | semi-condensed | semi-expanded | expanded | extra-expanded | ultra-expanded",
	"initial": "normal",
	"appliesTo": "all elements and text",
	"inherited": "yes",
	"percentages": "Not resolved",
	"computedValue": "a percentage, see below",
	"canonicalOrder": "per grammar",
	"animationType": "by computed value type",
	"values": [

[tidoust]

Oh, I missed this issue for some reason, sorry for the delay in responding, @OnkarRuikar!

For example, the font-stretch property was renamed to font-width. No browser has updated this change. So we have to keep font-stretch page in the docs.

Reformulating a bit differently to scope what I understand is the feature request here: font-stretch did not disappear, it's still defined in CSS Fonts Level 4 and present in the extract, but it's defined as a legacy name alias of font-width, and that relationship is not currently captured by the crawler.

Is there any way to reach font-width syntax using font-stretch as input?

Not now, but that's something that has been pending for a few years already, see w3c/reffy#538, which originated from #115 (comment).

Looking at specs that reference "legacy name alias", I end up with the following list:

• compat
• css-align-3
• css-flexbox-1
• css-fonts-4
• css-text-3
• css-text-4
• css-ui-4

It's certainly worth capturing the alias information somehow. Approaches that come to mind:

• Ideally, the crawler would be able to figure that out on its own, but I'm not sure it's going to be easy to capture definitions hidden in prose. That would be the preferred approach coz it'd be automatic.
• A patching approach is probably going to be cumbersome. Patches are meant to be temporary, these patches would stay forever and the list will grow over time.
• Alternatively, a curation script similar to tools/drop-css-property-duplicates.js could amend the extracts to add the alias links. Maintaining the list of links to add would remain manual, but the list would be at least easier to amend than a file patch.

[OnkarRuikar]

The curation script sounds good. We can hard code known aliases there.

[tidoust]

I managed to find a simple enough pattern to automate the extraction after all. Legacy CSS properties in CSS extracts now have a legacyAliasOf key set to the name of the property they alias. There may remain a few properties for which a patch or a curation script is going to be needed, but that does not appear needed to start with.

New property is in the main and curated branch, though not yet in a released @webref/css npm package because a few other unrelated bogus CSS updates prevent releasing a new package for now.

[tidoust]

Released in @webref/css v6.19.0