Re: [css3-text] Proposed pruning & scoping of hyphenation properties

Christian Stockwell:

> 2. In a similar vein, I don't see a use case for the "none" value for "hyphens".

People should use U+2011 (non-breaking hyphen) and similar characters for different scripts in those cases, but when they don’t this value could repair some of it. Not a strong use case, though. Furthermore, with ‘hyphenate-limit-before’ set to a value greater 1, my personal major use case for non-breaking hyphens (i.e. “e-mail” etc.) vanishes.

> 3. Is there a use case that requires us to make the hyphenate properties apply to all elements?

  p       {hyphens: auto;   display: block;}
  name    {hyphens: manual; display: inline;}
  acronym {hyphens: none;   display: inline;}

I frequently disable (automatic) hyphenation for certain text templates in text processors.

> 4. For "hyphens: auto" we should remove the clause specifying that explicit hyphenation should take priority over automatic resources.

Could we defer that to a different value or keep ‘auto’ under a different name (maybe repurpose ‘all’)? 
At least visible, hard hyphens should take precedence over other algorithmically found hyphenation opportunities, whereas invisible, soft hyphes may not necessarily do so.

            foobar    foo-bar   foo·bar   fo·ob·ar
  ‘none’    foobar    foo-bar   foobar    foobar
  ‘manual’  foobar    foo-|bar  foo-|bar  fo-|obar, foob-|ar
  ‘auto’    foo-|bar  foo-|bar  foo-|bar  fo-|obar, foob-|ar, foo-|bar?
  ‘all’     foo-|bar  foo-|bar  foo-|bar  fo-|ob-|ar? / fo-|o-|b-|ar?
  “trustUA” foo-|bar  foo-|bar  foo-|bar  foo-|bar 

The middle dot ‘·’ indicates the soft hyphen U+00AD, the vertical bar ‘|’ indicates possible line breaks. The hyphen/minus character used could as well be the explicit hyphen U+2010.

I hate wrong hyphenation more than unbalanced paragraphs.

> 5. … the hyphenate-limit-* properties should only apply when hyphens is set to "auto"

That made sense for me at first, but consider “e-mail”: I wouldn’t want a linebreak in there neither with ‘manual’ nor with ‘auto’, therefore I would set the limit to 2 or 3 characters (and I really should use a non-breaking hyphen, if I can control the data).

> conditional hyphens are already completely within the control of the author.

Content author and style author need not be the same person.

> Subject: [CSSWG] Minutes and Resolutions F2F Mountain View March 2011 Day 3: CSS3 Text
>> 
>>   - RESOLVED: add 'hyphenate', don't add 'none', to 'word-wrap'
>>   - RESOLVED: Make percentages on hyphenation-limit-zone relative to line box

Received on Friday, 18 March 2011 13:26:41 UTC