Re: [css3-lists] maintainance of counter styles WAS: Khmer consonants as list markers

On Fri, July 13, 2012 7:56 am, Florian Rivoal wrote:
...
> I think this is a good example of why the CSS WG shouldn't take the
> responsibility for specifying counter types for that many languages, at
> least not in a normative document. There are not enough experts of all
> languages in the working group to do a good job for all languages. In this
> case, we were lucky enough to be told what we were missing, but I don't
> think this is approach is reliable enough to scale.
>
> And if we're not sure our definitions are good or appropriate, making them
> normative and asking vendors to implement them sounds questionable to me.
>
> Maybe a better approach would be to start a community group tasked with
> developing and maintaining counter styles with a focus on i18n, and
> providing the result of their work as a stylesheet (or set of style
> sheets) that authors can use, rather than as a standard that vendors must
> support.

That is much the point that I was trying to make when I got started in the
Khmer business.  I spoke at the MultilingualWeb workshop in March [1] to
make the case [2] for the W3C to have more task forces (slide 24) to
capture expertise and/or a community group (slide 25) to crowdsource best
practices for laying out different scripts.  Khmer wasn't my original
focus, but I used it (slide 23) as one example of a script where I needed
to know more.  Following that, Richard Ishida, Brian Teeman, Sovichea SOU,
Sovann Heng and Danh Hong helpfully either provided information or put me
in touch with people who knew more, with the result that I first blogged
about the little I had learnt [3] then ended up submitting the Khmer
consonant list marker style here because there wasn't much point in only
me knowing about it.

XSL-FO was my excuse for getting on the MultilingualWeb programme, but I
don't see capturing best practices for laying out different scripts as
being specific to any stylesheet language.  The JLReq document, for
example, is useful to authors and page designers as well as spec writers,
and for many of us it's the best source we have for how to lay out
Japanese properly.  I'd be more than happy for other groups of experts to
do similar for other scripts, but I'd also be happy if there was a place
to just accumulate this sort of knowledge as and when it comes to light.

> This group could release updates more often than the WG could in a rec
> track document, make progress faster and achieve better coverage by
> focusing on the topic and thus potentially attract relevant experts who
> wouldn't consider joining the too generic CSS WG, provide multiple version
> simultaneously...

Counter styles sounds like a very narrow focus, but that could still be a
good thing.

Regards,


Tony Graham                                   tgraham@mentea.net
Consultant                                 http://www.mentea.net
Mentea       13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland
 --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --  --
    XML, XSL-FO and XSLT consulting, training and programming

[1]
http://www.multilingualweb.eu/en/documents/luxembourg-workshop/luxembourg-workshop-report
[2] http://www.mentea.net/resources/multilingualweb2012.pdf
[3] http://inasmuch.as/2012/03/22/khmer-pagination/

Received on Friday, 13 July 2012 22:02:45 UTC