Re: CSS3 Text Layout: Writing Latin bottom-to-top within line with blocks progressing to the right

On Jan 12, 2009, at 01:03, Alex Mogilevsky wrote:

> It's been proposed and was in earlier versions of CSS3 text. It has  
> lower priority because there is no live language that would use a  
> writing mode like that for normal writing.

I see. Without knowing the implementation details, I naïvely think  
that supporting the case of rotating Latin text layout 90 counter- 
clockwise would have a small incremental implementation cost once  
block-progression: rl; is already sunk cost.

> It should be there at some point. Probably CSS4 text.


I think adding this makes particular sense for enabling graceful  
degradation. One could emulate this using block-progression: rl; and  
then rotating the container 180 degrees around its center using CSS  
Transforms, but this approach won't degrade gracefully, because the  
implementation timelines for block-progression and Transforms are  
independent of each other and already there are CSS formatters out  
there that support one but not the other (Trident for block- 
progression and WebKit for Transforms).

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/