Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Nit: "Constructable" vs. "Constructible" #90

Open
tomayac opened this issue Jan 29, 2019 · 6 comments · Fixed by w3c/csswg-drafts#6304
Open

Nit: "Constructable" vs. "Constructible" #90

tomayac opened this issue Jan 29, 2019 · 6 comments · Fixed by w3c/csswg-drafts#6304

Comments

@tomayac
Copy link

tomayac commented Jan 29, 2019

I realize this is a bit of a nit and probably arguable, but constructible seems to be used a lot more frequently than constructable, and the Oxford dictionary even redirects searches for "constructable" to "constructible" (note the linked and final URL of this search). I suggest spelling the two occurrences (one is the actual spec's name) of "constructable" to now read "constructible". For example, #24 also uses this spelling.

@developit
Copy link

Indeed - I've been moving things over to "Constructible", since that is the US English spelling and generally specs go that route.

@rakina
Copy link
Member

rakina commented Jan 29, 2019

Thanks! It came up previously on #71. I think we should make the change, but @tabatkins - WDYT?

@tabatkins
Copy link
Contributor

tabatkins commented Jan 29, 2019

English is very... wiggly on -able vs -ible. The general rule (with plenty of exceptions) is that you use -able when the root (possibly with a silent -e tacked back on) is a full word on its own (buildable, foldable, comparable, etc), and -ible when the root isn't a full word (edible, etc.)

But it does appear that "constructible" is one of those exceptions, where English speakers have overall decided to use -ible in contravention of the general rule. That said, "constructable" is recognized as an alternate spelling. (Unlike most -able/-ible words, which definitely have only one accepted spelling.)

So in conclusion, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(I'd care more if the word actually showed up in an API, but this is just a spec name.)

@tomayac
Copy link
Author

tomayac commented Jan 29, 2019

To be honest I only noticed because Google Docs gave the word the "red curly underline you misspelled me" treatment. FWIW, my machine is set to speak en-US.

@domenic
Copy link
Contributor

domenic commented Jan 29, 2019

IMO this is a lot of churn and change for no real gain. Especially if the spec is going to merge into CSSOM, it's better to just leave as-is.

@developit
Copy link

I've reverted the update post and demo to use "Constructable"

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
5 participants