- From: Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>
- Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:07:41 +0200
- To: James Elmore <James.Elmore@cox.net>
- Cc: CSS <www-style@w3.org>
Also sprach James Elmore:
> Please get rid of the direction-specific words which change meaning
> when the text direction changes. I recognize that they have been used
> since the beginning, but to be useful in a multi-lingual world, CSS
> should not be bound only to English standards. Find reasonable
> equivalents and promote them, deprecating the older (and confusing)
> wording.
It was a concious decision to use the terms top, right, bottom and
left from the beginning. These terms are meaningful in all cultures
and languages.
Where it makes more sense, CSS relies on text direction. For example,
'text-indent' appears at the start of a sentence.
Indeed, most style sheet languages use a mixed model:
Properties to set white space and borders can be relative to the
writing direction (before/after/start/end), or absolute
(top/bottom/left/right and inside/outside). Most style sheet
languages have properties of both types (paragraph indentation is
always relative, and page margins are typically absolute) but tend
to favor one kind of property.
http://people.opera.com/howcome/2006/phd/
Cheers,
-h&kon
Håkon Wium Lie CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com http://people.opera.com/howcome
Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 16:08:30 UTC