mediawiki-skins-MinervaNeue/adr/0004-drop-support-for-LESS-color-functions-with-codex-tokens.md
Jan Drewniak b813c44202 Edit Less color functions ADR.
Editing ADR for clarity, fixing a few typos.

Change-Id: Ife38d66c0ddd333eff926744a1c22f54abb7400e
2024-03-14 11:56:48 -04:00

1.6 KiB

1. Drop support for Less color functions with Codex design tokens

Date: 2024-02-16 Last Edited: 2024-03-14

Status

Accepted.

Context

In order to reduce the strain on other teams/developers to update their extensions to use CSS variables rather than LESS, we decided to use Wikimedia skin variables to re-map LESS variables to their CSS variable equivalent.

e.i. @color-progressive: var( --color-progressive );

This is consistent with the Codex design token experimental build which we will make use of in T358059.

This approach has implications on LESS function that manipulate colors, such as average, fade and tint. These functions expect a parameter of type color. This approach changes the variable type from color to string, causing these functions to fail.

Decision

Given there are few consumers of these LESS functions, we've decided to remove support for LESS functions that operate on colors. The benefit of this decision is that it will reduce non-standard colors across the UI.

Consequences

Extensions that need to work with MinervaNeue for the time being can no longer use Less color functions with Codex design tokens. They can continue to use these function if they instead make use of hardcoded hex values (with an accompanying comment explaining this reason).

We filed a ticket for addressing this on the long term. This may require upgrading our version of LESS to a more modern version or a decision to drop support altogether.