- From: Thomas A. Fine <fine@head.cfa.harvard.edu>
- Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2012 13:55:54 -0500
- To: public-html@w3.org
On 12/17/12 6:58 AM, Robin Berjon wrote:
> I agree with this sentiment, but "digital textbooks" is more of a usage
> area than a use case. From the point of view of producing new solutions,
> it would be more useful to hear stories of the kind "I need to do this
> in my ebook because foo, but it doesn't work because bar." Such input is
> extremely valuable.
So just for example:
I need to format my text with extra space between sentences because:
* I want to demonstrate the historic norm for published works from
roughly 1650 to 1950
* There is some evidence to support that such spacing is helpful for
new readers, people with certain learning disabilities, and more
generally people who are speed-reading or scanning.
* Or just because I find it aesthetically pleasing
But it doesn't work because:
* The common practice of using fails because this is not
collapsed and can break the justified text either on the right, or on
the left depending on where the non-breaking space was used (see default
blogger post editor behavior, which preserves extra spaces using
but disrupts the left margin in left-justified text).
* Using other space entities may avoid that issue but the use of any
space entity still fails to give fine-grained CSS control of the formatting.
* Using spans for each sentence with CSS and the box model also
breaks justification, because the extra space added in a box model also
fails to collapse at line breaks.
* Using spans with CSS and the word-spacing parameter solves the
justification problems but it inverts the expected CSS hierarcy for
controlling layout, setting the word-spacing to the sentence size as a
more global value and overriding it locally for every single contained
element to set the word-spacing back to what is actually desired for
word spacing.
tom
Received on Monday, 17 December 2012 18:56:24 UTC