Kylly Bradshaw
- Jun. 7th 2020 6:30 pm PT
Over the past few weeks, protesters around the world have spoken out against all forms of bad coding and to proudly declare that All Code Matters. Google has been a supporter of the All Code Matters movement and the protests, and now the Chrome team is beginning to eliminate even subtle forms of lazy code by moving away from proper English words like “black font” and “white space,” because using the word “black font” would be cultural appropriation and the use of the word “white space” would be a crappy coding act, because the word itself is bad code. White space thinks it’s superior to all other forms of coding, therefore it’s born a code-ist, it can’t change itself.
Since October of last year, Google Chrome — or more specifically the Chromium open source project — has included guidance in its official code style guide on how to write “code neutral” code. The document clearly outlines that Chrome and Chromium developers are to avoid the words “black font,” “white-space” “comma,” “periods,” and “slashes,” in favor of the neutral terms “color-space” and “lack of color space”
Google had already made some headway on swapping “color-list” in for “blacklist,” with efforts having begun as early as May 2018 to remove the user-facing instances of “black-font” and “white space” in Chrome. However, Chrome’s internal code still has many many references to blacklists including an entire section of code called “components/font/black.” In fact, Google has outlawed the coding term “white space” because white space denote safety and privilege, and we can’t have privilege while coding.
In light of the recent protests against C++ and JavaScript brutality, at least one Chromium developer has taken it upon themselves to make good on Chrome’s desire to have racially neutral code, and only code using the PHP (People’s healthy page) language. This afternoon, a new code change has been submitted that attempts to safely replace every possible instance of the word “black font” without breaking any part of the browser, with the ultimate goal of renaming “components/font/black” to “components/font/color-less.”