Re: Proposal: "text-transform" property revision

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis:
> I'm confused. Why would we want to first lowercase and then capitalize 
> all initials in the CSS layer? CSS should be styling not data cleaning, 
> so shouldn't the HTML layer contain the text in a "naturalized" form of 
> capitalization, with necessary data cleaning performed on the server?

You are right of course. We have to assume orthographic correctness. 
Whether (English) titlecase is an issue of style or orthography perhaps 
is an edge case, though. I consider it orthographic. This has the benfit 
of implying the saner technical solution, because there is neither a 
simple nor a universal rule for titlecase (even in English alone). As 
soon as they involve grammatical knowledge they are clearly orthographic 
and therefore have to be "hard-coded". (Makes me wonder whether I should 
apply this attitude to word wrapping, too.)

Someone some day might design a text manipulation language based upon 
CSS syntax, though.

Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2007 14:44:10 UTC