Re: Revising text wrapping, line breaking, and white space properties in CSS3 (CSS3 Text: 6 and 7)

Richard Ishida wrote:
>
> Your suggestion certainly makes it much easier to understand and use this
 > currently complex set of properties.  I think it probably covers most of
 > the necessary possibilities, though I'd definitely like to hear Michel
 > Suignard's point of view, since he worked very hard on this stuff.
> 
> (I think it will make things clearer to use the explanations I tried in
 > my previous mail.)

Yes, I agree with that.

> Seems like one thing that is not available is to not collapse the consecutive
 > white-space-without-linebreaks independently of consecutive ws-with-linebreaks.
 > I'm not sure that's an i18n issue, however.  It occurred to me that it may be
 > useful for a script like Thai, where spaces are used to indicate phrase
 > boundaries (rather than words) - ie. not full stops.  In some cases multiple
 > spaces indicate more important boundaries.  This could probably be achieved by
 > using a combination of nbsp and space though.

One question I had wrt Thai and similar - would it be important to have a
white-space-with-breaks collapsing value that preserved trailing white space
before the first line break in the sequence?

> There may be an issue for people who want to preserve tabs while collapsing
 > consecutive ws-with-linebreaks ?

Markup-based tabs are being discussed separately in the working group.
I don't think white-space should cater to the use of tabs other than
a generic "preserve everything".

> I don't understand why you list multiple ways of declaring the same thing, eg:
> 
>>      white-space-sth: collapse;
>>      white-space-sth: collapse auto-collapse-breaks;
>>      white-space-sth: auto-collapse-breaks collapse;
>>      white-space-sth: auto-cllapse-breaks;
> 
> I think this is not a good idea, and would rather just see:
> 
>>      white-space-sth: auto-cllapse-breaks;

Depends on what combinations we want to see. If, for example,

   white-space-sth: preserve auto-collapse-breaks;

is a useful combination (e.g. for your multiple-spaces example above),
then allowing the two keywords is better.

> PS: 
> I started putting together some tests for white space treatment with ideographic 
> characters using CSS2.1. When I get a moment I'll expand them to include thai and
 > kana characters. They are currently based on CSS2.1 rules + assumptions drawn
 > from the CSS3 work.
> Tests: 
>  http://www.w3.org/International/tests/sec-white-space-1
>  http://www.w3.org/International/tests/sec-white-space-2
> Preliminary results and conclusions can be found at
>  http://www.w3.org/International/tests/results/white-space-ideograph

These are great, thank you so much!

> One specific question I have: should I make assumptions in the tests themselves.
 > ie. one of the tests currently says: "Displayed text should be a single line with
 > no spaces after the character ?."  An alternative approach, especially given that
 > we are making some assumptions here because the CSS2.1 spec is not very specific,
 > is to just say "Is there a single line? Is there a space before the character ?."
 > The end results page would be the same, since we express our assumptions there.

I'll defer to Ian Hickson on this one. :)

~fantasai

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Received on Thursday, 21 October 2004 06:52:46 UTC