- From: CSS Meeting Bot via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 04 Aug 2017 09:03:29 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
The CSS Working Group just discussed `tter-spacing should not apply to the end edge of a line/span?`. <details><summary>The full IRC log of that discussion</summary> <Rossen> Topic: tter-spacing should not apply to the end edge of a line/span?<br> <TabAtkins> kochi: Text 3 letter-spacing specifies that the letter-spacing after the last character of an element should be eliminated.<br> <Rossen> github-topic: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1518<br> <TabAtkins> koji: Concern that, while this is better, it may not be web compatible.<br> <Rossen> github topic: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1518<br> <TabAtkins> koji: Our team prefers it be opt-in, so existing pages still work but authors can choose the better model.<br> <TabAtkins> s/kochi/koji/<br> <kochi> all right :)<br> <TabAtkins> koji: It looks like Sebastian and François agrees<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: I know it's different, I wanna know if it actually causes a problem.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Adding extra stuff is extra cognitive laod on the author; it would be better ot just do the right thing.<br> <TabAtkins> koji: We have a bug requesting this feature for years.<br> <TabAtkins> koji: He wants to stop using negative margin to cancel the space.<br> <TabAtkins> koji: If we change things, his pages' compensation will instead ram the characters together.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Right, question is how many people will have that problem, and how many will be *fixed* by the change.<br> <fremy> q+<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: If you have a large amoutn of letter-spacing to cancel, so large negative margin, and there's text after, that's a problem.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: But if it's a small letter-spacing, it'll have less than ideal spacing but still *okay*, but lots of other pages will have improved letter spacing.<br> <TabAtkins> koji: I think it's a little self-contradicting - people want this feature to care about it, and people who care can apply negative margin today.<br> <fantasai> myles_: I don't think that's necessarily true<br> <fantasai> TabAtkins: I've never realized I needed to deal with this case<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: There's a diff between caring about letter-spacing, caring and noticing there's a problem, and caring, noticing, and trying to fix it with this hack.<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: What's stated in the spec is generally the correct result. I'd like to implement it, but I share fantasai's hesitation that we don't know how much will break.<br> <fremy> ack fremy<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: I'm not hesitant, I think we should try it.<br> <Rossen> q?<br> <TabAtkins> fremy: letter-spacing is used eveyrwhere on the web, so even if a tiny fraction care enough to use the hack, it'll still be a lot of web pages.<br> <TabAtkins> fremy: And browsers are mostly interoperable today. I don't think it's a huge problem to keep current spec, add new glyph-spacing property that works properly, and tell authors to use latter.<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: glyph-spacing is bad name<br> <TabAtkins> fremy: Sure, anything works.<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: I think making two solutions, one broken and one working, isn't great. We should investigate fixing the one.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Someone has to ship it then.<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: Or crawl for it.<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: Look for letter-sapcing and negative-margin on the same element.<br> <TabAtkins> Florian: Hard to tell automatically if it's bad.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Have to investigate the *inherited* letter-spacing value, and if negative margin on the element.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: That's the pages that are trying to work around it.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: But there's also millions of pages that aren't trying to fix it, and will look better when we change it.<br> <dbaron> q+<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: So it's a balance of how much bad it is.<br> <fremy> q+<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Slijghty worse appearance, or readability is affected.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: So you have to actually look at the page.<br> <Rossen> q?<br> <TabAtkins> bdc: Huge letterspacing is bad design by default, while negative letterspacing i soften used for proper kerning.<br> <fantasai> If it's mostly just slightly worse appearance, we're winning: there are many many more pages that aren't trying to compensate.<br> <TabAtkins> bdc: So there, we'd have the opposite issue - if we remove the space after last letter, we'd have bigger space between words than we currently have.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: If you apply letter-spacing to whole paragraph, no impact.<br> <TabAtkins> ack<br> <tantek> q?<br> <Rossen> ack dbaron<br> <TabAtkins> dbaron: This isn't th efirst time it's brought up - maybe web compat, don't know, a little afraid of it.<br> <TabAtkins> dbaron: If it is web-compatible we should stick to the current design.<br> <TabAtkins> dbaron: If we wanna conclude it's not, we need more evidence than brought so far that it's not.<br> <TabAtkins> dbaron: Until we have evidence that it's not, we should stop trying to discuss it every six months.<br> <tantek> agreed with dbaron<br> <Rossen> q?<br> <Rossen> ack fremy<br> <astearns> +1 to dbaron<br> <TabAtkins> fremy: I've seen a lot of websites using letter-spacing for not letter-spacing itself; icon fonts and aligning, letter-spacing of 1px because "it looks better on my PC", ...<br> <TabAtkins> fremy: I'm concerned it'll be a lot of webpages, but I"m not sure how to figure it out.<br> <myles_> I think dbaron made the point I was trying to make, but much more elegantly than I did<br> <TabAtkins> TabAtkins: Do a good collection of affected pages via a crawl, then we can just sample them to whatever accuracy you want. Basic stats.<br> <tantek> or at least provide URLs to illustrative examples (didn't see any in the issue)<br> <TabAtkins> koji: I'm not clear on the next actions.<br> <tantek> (illustrative real world examples, not artificial data URls etc.)<br> <TabAtkins> koji: I think someone has to do a collection and figure out whether it's problematic or not.<br> <fantasai> s/not./not?/<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: Someone somewhere has to prove that an impl that follows the spec is not web-compatible.<br> <fantasai> TabAtkins: WG likes the current spec, and puts burden of proof on implementations to prove that it's not Web-compatible<br> <fantasai> TabAtkins: Need to evaluate pages where they have negative right margin that matches to the letter-spacing<br> <fantasai> TabAtkins: And then see if they are actually broken<br> <TabAtkins> koji: So who will do this?<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: Whoever wants to change the spec.<br> <TabAtkins> koji: Spec has been there for five years so far...<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Yeah, nobody has stepped forward to implement this.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: We want a spec and impls to match.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: So first option is somebody impls and ships and sees what trouble they have.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Second is somebody does a crawl and checks the stats.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Broken vs sligthy suboptimal; we dont' carea bout latter, because w'ell fix a bunch more pages.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Third is we do what we did with control characters, where we all ship at same time.<br> <TabAtkins> Florian: Option 1 where things just ship, there are release channels for early info...<br> <TabAtkins> bdc: I don't see how the crawl is possible really - the margin might be a little different than th espacing, they might have negative spacing and positive margin...<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: position margin is fine; it doesn't cause overlapping that hurts readability, just puts in a larger gap.<br> <TabAtkins> bdc: So I'm in favor of just keepign the spec as it is.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: So in favor of moving forward, do impls have a pref on which strategy to use?<br> <TabAtkins> koji: To me this is a nice feature, but not worth spending a week doing a crawl.<br> <TabAtkins> koji: So I'd much rather have another property that does opt-in.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: That won't give us useful information.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Majority of people aren't paying attention to this, or aren't caring enough to do anything about it.<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: I think, going along with Elika, you can track the # of times you encouter a website that uses it, but that's only useful as a fraction, and you don't know the denominator.<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: I can say 1k websites use the property, but we don't know how many sites considered it and didn't use it because it was bad for them.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: [repeats three options]<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: And I think the WG is generally agreeing that changing the spec isn't a valid fourth option.<br> <TabAtkins> Bert: Gradual change; reduce it by half this year, then quarter next year, eventually it's nothing.<br> <TabAtkins> Rossen: So I don't think we did very good with the third option.<br> <TabAtkins> Rossen: Anyone want to do option #1?<br> <TabAtkins> [crickets]<br> <TabAtkins> Rossen: Anyone wants to crawl?<br> <TabAtkins> [crickets]<br> <TabAtkins> Rossen: So we're at same position as before.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: Question on #1 - we had zero interest in impl and shipping it.<br> <TabAtkins> fantasai: But if someone was to give you a patch, you just had to ship it, then what?<br> <TabAtkins> myles_: I'm happy to investigate it. I'll impl and see if it doesn't work.<br> <TabAtkins> Rossen: Sounds good.<br> <fantasai> s/investigate it/investigate it, I want to make this work/<br> <dbaron> I think Gecko would be happy to try taking a patch.<br> <dbaron> Probably don't have the resources to do it in the near future.<br> <TabAtkins> ACTION Myles to investigate changing letter-spacing impl to match spec regarding spacing at start/end of element.<br> <trackbot> Created ACTION-857 - Investigate changing letter-spacing impl to match spec regarding spacing at start/end of element. [on Myles Maxfield - due 2017-08-11].<br> <TabAtkins> <br dur=15min><br> </details> -- GitHub Notification of comment by css-meeting-bot Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1518#issuecomment-320197416 using your GitHub account
Received on Friday, 4 August 2017 09:03:29 UTC