Eric Bidelman introduces the CSS Typed Object Model. It looks like it’s going to make dealing with getting and setting style values through JavaScript easier and less error-prone. Less stringy, more number-y when appropriate.

Like if we wanted to know the padding of an element, classically we’d do:

var el = document.querySelector("#thing");
var style = window.getComputedStyle(el);
console.log(style.padding);

And we’d get “20px” as a string or whatever it is.

One of these new API’s lets us pull it off like this:

console.log( el.computedStyleMap().get('padding').value, el.computedStyleMap().get('padding').unit
);

And we get 20 as a real number and “px” as a string.

There is also attributeStyleMap with getters and setters, as well as functions for each of the values (e.g. CSS.px() CSS.vw()).

Eric counts the benefits:

  1. Few bugs.
  2. Arithmetic operations & unit conversion.
  3. Value clamping & rounding.
  4. Better performance.
  5. Error handling.
  6. Naming matches CSS exactly.

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