Re: [CSS3-UI] text-overflow:ellipsis (freshly rewritten/expanded and incorporated into editor's draft)

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 8:02 AM, Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 23, 2011 at 00:56, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>
> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 7:53 PM, Tantek Çelik <tantek@cs.stanford.edu>
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> I've applied the filter of only documenting what appears to be
> >> interoperably implemented,
> >
> > Unfortunately, only the simplest situations are handled interoperably
> among
> > IE, Webkit and Opera, so documenting the interoperable stuff leaves most
> > behavior undefined :-).
>
>
> If that's so, then web authors/developers are unlikely to be depending
> on things other than "the simplest situations".
>
> That will do for CSS3-UI.  Anything that is currently not
> interoperable among the three implementations I will leave explicitly
> undefined / up to the implementation in CSS3-UI.
>

Personally I would rather not have the feature appear in a spec, than have
it appear with such a large volume of undefined behavior. If it was a
genuinely new feature I would object most strenuously. Since text-overflow
is already being used in the wild without prefix, I guess having CSS3UI
describe it is OK. But I think at least there should be strong warnings in
the spec noting the known areas of undefined behavior, e.g.
"WARNING: the behavior of text-overflow:ellipsis on a block with 'overflow'
other than 'hidden' is currently undefined. The effect of
text-overflow:ellipsis on lines whose line boxes are not direct children of
the block box(es) with text-overflow is currently undefined. The interaction
of text-overflow:ellipsis with event handling is currently undefined. The
behavior of text-overflow:ellipsis on lines containing replaced elements is
currently undefined. The behavior of text-overflow:ellipsis on lines
containing right-to-left text is currently undefined. We expect these
behaviors to be specified in future versions of CSS."

Rob
-- 
"Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for
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every day to see if what Paul said was true." [Acts 17:11]