Re: [css3-text] Feature request: "white-space: ignore"

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 2:31 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Jon Ronnenberg
> <jon.ronnenberg@gmail.com> wrote:
>> MY PITCH
>> While Flexbox[5] is a wonderful thing, it isn't backwards compatible and
>> implementing a shim has proven very difficult[12]. In contrast a small
>> amendment to CSS3 Text module, namely "white-space: none;", is easy to shim
>> and fixes a lot of issues that web developers are facing today.
>
> Once again, you can't fix "X isn't supported" by proposing a new
> unsupported feature.  That just produces a new, larger "X and Y aren't
> supported" problem.

I think you're missing his point. He's arguing on the basis that Y is
much smaller than X, at least arguably a desirable feature even when X
is available, and, critically, _easy to polyfill_, which X is
decidedly not.  Thus, if Y is added to the spec even just in an ED,
people can start using it _right now_, which they cannot do with X.

I think you also grossly underestimate the amount of time before
Flexbox will be universal enough that people can rely on it.  The CR
was in September 2012, so given the typical lifespan of old versions
of IE, the difficulty of polyfilling Flexbox, and the difficulty of
writing a stylesheet that gracefully degrades in the absence of
Flexbox, you should assume no sooner than 2017.

zw

Received on Saturday, 20 April 2013 18:57:15 UTC