Re: Feedback on hyphenation properties

On 08/04/2010 01:49 PM, Simon Fraser wrote:
> We have reviewed the hyphenation-related properties in the GCPM module
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-gcpm/>  and have the following feedback.
> ...
> The property names "hyphenate-before" and "hyphenate-after" don't convey
> their purpose very well. The naive reader may assume that they are used
> to specify characters before/after which splitting is allowed.
> They are really "keep at least N characters before/after the
> hyphen", which suggest they should have "min" in their names.
> Unfortunately no succinct alternatives spring to mind.
>
> Do we really need both "hyphenate-before" and "hyphenate-after" properties,
> or would a single "hyphenation-min-fragment-length" property suffice?
>
> "hyphenate-lines" also doesn't convey its purpose very well. It's about
> the maximum number of consecutive hyphenated lines. It's also odd to
> have a "no-limit" value, rather than choosing a property name which
> makes sense with a value of "none".

How about
   hyphenate-limit-before
   hyphenate-limit-after
   hyphenate-limit-lines
?

> Finally we think that doing language-sensitive hyphenation is hard
> because most web content does not have the appropriate "lang" attributes.
> We'd like to suggest a property that permits language-sensitive hyphenation,
> namely "hyphenation-locale" (or "hyphenate-locale"), that an author can use
> to inform the UA about what locale should be used for hyphenation:
>
> hyphenation-locale: auto | string
> where the string is a locale identifier.
>
> If not auto, the value would override the language derived from any present
> "lang" attributes.

If the author is explicitly informing us of the language, then they should
be doing that through a 'lang' attribute. Suggesting that they put it in
the style sheet like this is counterproductive, imho.

I agree with the rest of your comments.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 4 August 2010 22:30:04 UTC