Re: [css3-writing-modes] before/after terminology alternative?

On 05/28/2012 08:42 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 6:22 AM, Christoph Päper
> <christoph.paeper@crissov.de>  wrote:
>> fantasai (2012-05-01):
>>> We're pretty settled on start/end for the logical inline directions,
>>> but most people aren't that thrilled with before/after for the logical
>>> block directions. Someone suggested head/tail as an alternative.
>>
>>   – ‘initial’ / ‘final’
>>   – ‘begin’ / ‘stop’
>>   – ‘head’ / ‘foot’
>>   – ‘ceil’ / ‘floor’
>
> 'head' / 'foot' actually makes some sense to me, as it corresponds to
> the directions of the header/footer in a document.  That's
> writing-mode dependent, and easy to explain.  (Plus, it always makes
> me strangely happy when keyword pairs are the same length.)

I like head/foot as well. Unlike before/after, it's immediately obvious
which directions it corresponds to, and it's not confusable with start/end.
And given a pile of head/foot/start/end keywords, it makes it easy to map
all of them to directions: once head/foot is assigned, start/end are easy.

It doesn't have the confusion with :before/:after that Sylvain noted [1].
And as terminology in the specs it'll also avoid any confusion with DOM/
source order terms. It seems to work well as values for 'caption-side' and
'float', and 'margin-head'/'margin-foot' makes perfect sense as well.

The one problem we've had with fixing the confusion of before/after was
finding another pair that was clearly better. And I think this is *clearly*
better.

I'm in favor of switching over! We haven't released any CR specs with any
before/after syntax yet, so we still have the opportunity...

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012May/0071.html

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 28 May 2012 21:18:56 UTC