Re: [css3-text] clarifying text-transform:capitalize

On 04/25/2012 05:32 PM, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu wrote:
> (12/04/21 10:56), fantasai wrote:
>>> (a) that we're happy with the CSS3 Text definition here, as far as it
>>> goes, in particular recognizing that it means certain word-initial
>>> punctuation characters will be treated differently by ‘first-letter’
>>> and ‘capitalize’; and
>
> The corresponding prose to this question is
>
>    # ‘capitalize’
>    #
>    # Puts the first letter of each word in titlecase; other characters
>    # are unaffected.
>
> and
>
>    # A letter for the purpose of this specification is a character
>    # belonging to one of the Letter or Number general categories in
>    # Unicode. [UAX44]
> [...]
> vagueness doesn't cover cases Jonathan brought up: "_css_", "-test-",
> while it covers all Koji[1] and Xaxio[2]'s cases, which include
> "the.the" and "dog/wolf" and some others.

Actually, the wording "first letter of each word" covers those cases.
There's no argument that, if nothing else, a space is considered a
word separator. And the first letter of _css_ is the 'c', not the
underscore.

> Therefore, I believe the correct rephrasing of the question (which is
> more of less related but not the same as fantasai's question) is:
>
>    - Do we want to accidentally make Firefox and WebKit non-conforming in
> this level by boring cases like "_css_" and "-test-"?

I think that's acceptable. We're not documenting interop in level 3
like we were in level 2; we're setting a goal for correct behavior.

> If we instead want get more interoperability on 'text-transform:
> titlecase;' at this level, we should probably start by looking at
> "dog/wolf", which seems more like a useful case. (full UAX#29 seems too
> infeasible at this level.)

I think my conclusion here is that trying to get interop on what word
boundaries are used for capitalization is not worth either the spec-writing
or engineering effort, since the right answer in many cases is dependent on
language and typographical tradition. So we should leave this aspect undefined,
as it already is. Though you're probably right that slashes at least should be
considered word separators. :)

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 18 July 2012 14:52:44 UTC