Images as text-decoration

I have two proposals for text decoration: a)a new style and b)to permit 
images to be setted as text decoration.

The new style that I propose is a line with corners, or curve lines, at 
the ends, one opening and one closing so that to act as delimiters of 
the decorated text; the ends does not repeat when prolonging the 
decoration, the only part that repeats ("tiles") is the central, 
straight one.

I modelled the second proposal on this new type of decoration style, 
where only a part of the decoration repeats; the properties were 
suggested by css3-border, excuse me if there are errors in the grammar 
but I don't have access to the css3-syntax module.

Name: text-underline-image, text-line-through-image, text-overline-image
Value: <uri> {1|3} /*that is repeat <uri> 1 or 3 times*/ | none | inherit
Initial: none
Applies to:	all elements and generated content
Inherited: yes /*[1]*/
Percentages: N/A
Media: visual

The URIs here have generally different meanings from that of 
border-image; well OK if you give one URI it's the same, the first tile 
is centered on the line and then treated following the -fit properties. 
If you give three URIs the first and third (which are positioned at the 
left and the right respectively) do not repeat, and the second is 
centered on the line and then repeated (the opposite of css3-border).
As for giving two URIs, I don't think it would be a good thing to 
include the possibility to do it, because it would be difficult to 
understand that the two different images refer both to the same link.

Name: text-underline-fit, text-line-through-fit, text-overline-fit
Value: [clip | repeat | scale | stretch | overwrite | overflow | space] 
/*[2]*/ {1,2}
Initial: repeat
Applies to: all elements and generated content
Inherited: no
Percentages: N/A
Media: visual

[2] I'm not sure I agree with these values, but they don't strictly deal 
with this proposal so I just followed border-fit.


The utility of the new type of decoration style (including here the new 
text-<decoration>-style and text-<decoration>-images with 3 URIs) is 
that you can immediately see when the decoration really ends and when it 
is just an interpolation with another similar decoration. For example, 
consider nested links, that will be probably permitted in XHTML 2.0: 
nested links pose the problem to understand where the parent link ends 
and where there's just another link inside it; you can partially resolve 
the problem by using different colors or different decoration styles for 
various sub-layers of links, but this can be done just at a limited 
extent with css, and it is not so much clear; instead, having opening 
and closing "brackets" at the true ends of the decoration you can easily 
see where it doesn't end and a new one begins.
[1] I put the "inherited" flag on on text-<decoration>-image precisely 
for this purpose, because these styles are useful only when they are 
used both by the parents and the childs. Still I have some doubt: 
text-<decoration>-style properties in the actual specification does not 
inherit and text-<decoration>-image properties permits also normal 
styles of that kind, so perhaps it is not just to set "inherit" to 
<decoration>-image; or should <decoration>-style inherits too?

Received on Wednesday, 27 November 2002 21:43:53 UTC