Re: [css3-text] Splitting CSS Text into Level 3 and Level 4

On 11/23/11 8:26 AM, "Florian Rivoal" <florianr@opera.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 23 Nov 2011 17:14:43 +0100, Alan Stearns <stearns@adobe.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> I'm not sure that we would gain anything by getting more specific,
>> though.
>> There are valid choices to make that will differ between implementations.
>> Perhaps the test cases could check that the spacing changes at each
>> priority
>> level are roughly equivalent, and that higher priority changes are larger
>> than lower-priority changes.
> 
> This is essentially my problem with this. If we're too specific, we make
> prevent UA implementers from picking a number of good solutions. If we're
> not very specific, the behavior is so loosely defined that it allows for
> some
> terrible implementations to be considered conforming, and authors don't get
> much insurance that what looked good on a conforming UA will look
> reasonably
> similar on another conforming UA.
> 
> Again, I don't have a better solution, but so far, I've seen versions of
> this
> that are too strict to allow good implementations, or too loose to
> guarantee
> meaningful interoperability. I don't know if we can solve this problem by
> tweaking the proposed property a little bit, or if we need to find a
> different
> approach.
> 
>   - Florian

You initially brought up two problems with text-justify (and by extension
letter-spacing and word-spacing). The first was that you don't think there's
enough in the spec to ensure interoperability, and the second was that what
was in the spec is not testable. I've argued against the second problem. I
think that what's in the spec is testable. If you disagree please let me
know, otherwise I'm assuming we can drop that part.

On the question of meaningful interoperability, I'm assuming that a good
faith effort to implement text justification according to this spec will
result in reasonably similar results. Your "reasonably similar" may be more
strict than mine, but please know that poorly-justified text is one of my
personal bugbears.

What's currently described in CSS Text Level 3 is a vast improvement on CSS
2.1. The results we have now for text-align:justify are not interoperable or
even reasonably good. The current spec text is correct, it's just (possibly)
not complete. I would rather not wait for another module cycle to improve
text justification. My preference is to make progress on this feature now,
and keep refining it in future modules.

Alan

Received on Wednesday, 23 November 2011 20:29:57 UTC