Re: [css3-text-layout] New editor's draft - margin-before/after/start/end etc.

Shinyu Murakami wrote:

> - cannot use in inline style attributes, e.g. style="margin-left: 2em"
> - cannot write basic default stylesheet.

I agree, in both these cases you cannot easily construct styles that work
in both the horizontal and vertical text cases.

> MS IE supports many writing modes (total 8 writing modes, see:
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/05/29/the-css-corner-writing-mode.aspx )
> and seems to have good default style sheet, works in all
> writing modes,

It does work but what you get by default isn't always usuable in both
horizontal and vertical modes.   Consider how the two examples below
render in IE8, the only difference is writing-mode: tb-rl applied to
the vertical example.

Horizontal version (no writing-mode):
http://people.mozilla.org/~jdaggett/tests/wagahaiwanekodearu.html

Vertical version (writing-mode: tb-rl):
http://people.mozilla.org/~jdaggett/tests/wagahaiwanekodearu-vert.html

The horizontal mode ends up as one long vertical block with the view
positioned at the top.  The vertical mode version ends up with a long
horizontal block with the view positioned at the *end* of the text
(i.e. the far left).  Good default styles or not, one is usuable, the
other has problems.  I'm not knocking IE8, I think there are hard problems
here that aren't solved with simple solutions.

> I think the cost for implementations will not be big problem in such
> future.

I think you're underestimating the impact of this change.  You are basically
virtualizing top/bottom/left/right, so any other property that uses 
top/bottom/left/right needs an expanded set of values or requires redefinition.

Other properties in CSS 2.1:

'background-position'
'caption-side'
'clear'
'float'
'text-align'
'vertical-align'

Other CSS3 modules affected:

CSS3 Multi-Columns (column-rule-width)
CSS3 2D Transforms (transform-origin)
CSS3 3D Transforms (perspective-origin, transform-origin)
CSS3 Backgrounds (border-image, border-color, border-style, lots and lots of others)
CSS3 Images
CSS3 Paged Media (?)
CSS3 Transitions (logical properties can be transitioned?)

These all use physical properties in one way or another.

John Daggett

Received on Tuesday, 8 June 2010 07:14:55 UTC