[css-ruby] 'right' vs 'bopomofo' value name

> From: fantasai [mailto:fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net]
> Sent: 01 December 2010 19:18
> To: Richard Ishida
> Cc: www-style@w3.org
> Subject: Re: [css-ruby] Proposal to publish new WD
...
> With regards to the changes in 4.1:
> 
>    With regards to bopomofo, I think that
>    - 'right' should remain 'right', and not change to 'bopomofo'.
>      Certainly the main use case it is solving is bopomofo, but
>      bopomofo can be written other ways, and there's no reason
>      this style of ruby can't be used for other things.
> 
>    - 'ruby-position: right' should force the ruby text into
>      vertical writing mode--i.e. the computed value of 'writing-mode'
>      is forced based on the 'ruby-position' value. This makes the
>      rendering of non-bopomofo ruby defined.
> 
>    - The paragraphs on bopomofo rendering and tone marks should
>      be separated out into their own section. IIRC bopomofo has
>      special handling requirements in both horizontal and vertical
>      writing modes, and these apply whether it's rendered as CSS ruby
>      or inline. So although it might be a good idea to describe these
>      requirements in this specification, I believe that, like Arabic
>      shaping and bidi, these should be handled at the text rendering
>      layer, not the CSS ruby layout layer.
> 
> ~fantasai


A major reason for the proposed change is that 'right' has been commonly confused with 'before' in vertical text in previous past discussions.  That points to the need to use a different word than 'right'.  I think leaving the value as 'right' will be particularly confusing to the general public once they start using this.

Next, the value should cause not only the vertical arrangement to kick in (unlike 'inline'), but also the special treatment for placement of tone marks, which only occurs, as far as I'm aware, when bopomofo is used as ruby to the right of base text (ie. it *doesn't* occur when bopomofo is used with ruby-position: before).  This value needs to be a clue to the user agent that this special treatment should be applied.

Also, I'm not convinced that vertical alignment of ruby to the right of a single character is such a widespread use case (or if it even exists outside the bopomofo case) that it's necessary to choose a universally applicable name for the value.

I therefore think it is clearer for users if we use a script specific label for this very specific feature, much as we do in text-justify: kashida or text-justify: inter-ideograph, etc.

RI

Received on Thursday, 2 December 2010 15:10:27 UTC