Re: [css3-writing-modes] Summary of Tr in UTR#50 and 'text-orientation' discussions

Rossen Atanassov wrote:

>>>> How about take it out of CSS all together? Unicode already
>>>> defines it all so why can't we leave it at that and remove these
>>>> properties from CSS?
>>>
>>> By this you mean omit 'text-orientation' altogether?
>> 
>> +1 to Rossen. I think by "take it out" he meant to take out section
>> 5.1.1 Mixed Vertical Orientations, which defines the values of the
>> Unicode Vertical_Orientation property.
> 
> Right, I meant section 5.1.1 only. 

So orientation is determined how exactly?  If what you're suggesting
is "user agent determines" or some other non-normative wording then
that's exactly what we have today and the results are already clear --
orientation varies across user agents (e.g. IE and Webkit) in weird
and wonderful ways.

We resolved two years ago to base orientation *normatively* on a
clear, well-defined orientation character property.  Through many
twists and turns, we've basically got something that works, is fairly
clear, and for the most part reflects common practice.  There's just
one crumb of "optional" behavior for "Tr" codepoints that doesn't
makes sense for authors or implementations.  I suggest that rather
than giving up on normatively defining default orientation that we
simply purge the optional behavior and move on.

Cheers,

John Daggett

Received on Tuesday, 8 October 2013 23:59:56 UTC