Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-counter-styles-3] Should "Ready-made Counter Styles" be supported by UA? (#8636)

1. I do not believe even a tiny minority of web developers know that the Ready-made Counters doc exists. That's why I talked about it in [What's new in CSS](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10121/?time=1729) — to help spread the word. But a document like that will never get widespread evangelism. 99% of web developers do not know that the CSS Working Group exists, let alone the Internationalization Working Group. They don't know what web standards are. They do not look up things in any flavor of W3C document. They depend instead on other resources that represent what's supposed to be shipping in browsers.

2. I have great hope that browsers will align on whatever the CSSWG agrees should be done. It will take a year or so to get there — but it's incredibly doable for every browser to ship 100% interoperable implementations of the entire Ready-made Counters document. DevRel / evangelism can coordinate. We can ask Interop 2024 to help by [publicizing](https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023) test failures. The CSSWG is the right place to encourage such interoperability… Things are much different than they were 20 years ago, when it was very common for browsers to have done something quite different from each other with very little hope of getting to interoperability.

3. Many browsers already support more languages than what was listed by the CSSWG. It's already impossible to know which languages are supported in which browsers, because [MDN documents](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/list-style-type) what the spec says, not the current reality. By specifying a larger set and pushing for interoperability on that larger set, this reduces the amount of work for developers, not increases it. As it is now, it's likely a developer will try something in their favorite browser — and assume if it works/doesn't that's how it will work/not in every browser. They often do not test. And will end up with missing support on platforms they are not checking. The above resolution is how to get to interoperability. 

4. If these styles are part of what browser are expected to ship, then they will get far better documentation on MDN and other CSS resources — books, blogs, conference talks, videos, podcasts. There will be developer documentation for both the UA stylesheet, and for how to override it. 

5. Personally, I really don't want us to stop at "these languages are supported because they were there first, all the rest are not important enough to be included — so go find this document hardly anyone knows about, and add support to your website for your language manually". There were many things baked into the web in the 1990s that favors English and other European (Latin-based / `horizontal-tb`, LTR) scripts as "correct", while the cultures of many countries are considered "not worthy". I expect everyone on the Internationalization Working Group does _not_ believe this — and that's why you've dedicated years of work and tons of expertise to make the web truly international. But let's undo the wrongs of the past, and unbias the early choices as much as possible. Entire continents have few indigenous languages listed in what's "supposed to be" in the UA stylesheet (prior to the above resolution), while colonial languages are deeply represented. Don't we want to change this? We should make it as easy as possible to switch from "1, 2, 3" to another counter style. Not make it easy for a few cultures, while hard for most. We might not be able to get all cultures, or keep things perfectly up to date, but we can try. We can succeed 80-90% of the time, and give developers the tools they need to perfect support the other 10-20%.

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Received on Tuesday, 20 June 2023 21:40:28 UTC