Re: HTML 5.1 Use Cases

On 17 December 2012 18:55, Thomas A. Fine <fine@head.cfa.harvard.edu> wrote:

> But it doesn't work because:
>   * 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.
>

I don't see how that's too bad:

p {word-spacing:.5em}
.sentence {word-spacing:.1em}

(Although "sentence-spacing" would be more meaningful.)

I think the temptation may be to author this construct with no whitespace
between sentences, like this:
<p><sentence></sentence><sentence></sentence><sentence></sentence><sentence></sentence></p>.
 Then it doesn't work.

As this technique would require the author to enter whitespace between
sentence elements, I'm not sure it's the best approach, the new element
would have to ensure the whitespace is implicit if it's not been explicitly
entered.

I think the technique not mentioned yet is to preserve whitespace via CSS:

p {white-space:pre-wrap;}

For any typical developer/author, this would be easiest because they just
need to enter additional space between sentences, if that's what they
desire.

-- 
Lee
www.webdeavour.co.uk