RE: first-word pseudo-element

Can't a hypothetical :first-word be used combined with a mandatory
@charset ? lol... I guess css has no dtd... what about FO?
Manos

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Sampo Syreeni [mailto:decoy@iki.fi]
> Sent: Friday, May 18, 2001 4:18 PM
> To: Ian Hickson
> Cc: www-style@w3.org
> Subject: Re: first-word pseudo-element
> 
> 
> On Fri, 18 May 2001, Ian Hickson wrote:
> 
> >> All text/visual properties should apply to all languages 
> and writing
> >> system.
> >
> >We'd better drop 'text-transform' then...
> 
> Besides, even while most of the world seems to have writing 
> systems that are
> a lot more difficult to handle than the ones based on the 
> Latin alphabet,
> can this really be a reason to make it impossible for Western 
> CSS users to
> achieve Latin specific formattings? We have to remember that 
> vertical text
> is only now becoming available in CSS (a clear inequality of writing
> systems), and we also have ruby (which is almost exclusively 
> a feature of
> Chinese/Japanese typography).
> 
> One might say that is because both of the above idioms can be 
> extended to
> all text. But that is true about the simplistic version of 
> word spacing as
> well - just define words, in the context of CSS, as something 
> delimited by
> some subset of Unicode characters. Then if you want 
> word-spacing to work,
> use explicit whitespace and/or zero width variants, 
> regardless of language.
> 
> Furthermore, the text content in XML consists of abstract Unicode
> characters. If we apply word-spacing to the *real* word boundaries in
> ideographic text, we would effectively insert something that is better
> encoded in the text itself: in Unicode, spaces are first 
> class abstract
> characters. They are also absent from widely used character 
> encodings whose
> native typography does not utilize word spacing, so to me it 
> would seem
> natural to redefine word-spacing as a character level styling 
> functionality
> for certain Unicode characters. Otherwise we are trying to relate a
> grammatical unit of non-Western languages (word) to a feature 
> of Western
> typography (space), which is obviously wrong.
> 
> Finally, Far Eastern CSS users might actually be quite happy with this
> simple solution, since word related properties could then be 
> specified for
> mixed international text without breaking normal ideographic 
> text formatting
> in the process. And those who have a specific need to go 
> against the Eastern
> typographic tradition could still resort to the foreign 
> idiom, inserting
> explicit whitespace.
> 
> Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy@iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
> student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
> 
>

Received on Friday, 18 May 2001 09:59:24 UTC