Re: Proposing new values for list-style-type

On Wed, Sep 16, 2020, at 8:04 PM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> Hi!

Hi Amir,

> What is the way to propose new values for list-style-type?
> 
> In Wikipedia we have recently added support for three new languages:
> 1. Santali (Ol Chiki script)
> 2. N'Ko (N'Ko script)
> 3. Manipuri (Meetei script)
> 
> All of these writing systems have their own digits. The wiki editors in these languages asked to see ordered lists (<ol>) with their native digits. CSS has support for arabic-indic, armenian, hebrew, devanagari, malayalam, and many other systems, but not for these three scripts.
> 
> What is the right way to propose their addition to the standard? The values will probably be ol-chiki, nko, and meetei.

Nowadays the CSS working group mainly uses GitHub to track spec changes, so the proper way would be to create a new issue in https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts. However, given that we already have @counter-style spec'ed and implemented in Firefox, I don't think it's very likely CSSWG would be willing to accept new builtin counter styles.

I would instead suggest that you create a new issue or pull request against https://github.com/w3c/predefined-counter-styles to add these styles to the ready-made list. And as you can see in this list, there are just too many styles that can be added, and it's probably not a great idea to build all of them into CSS.

> In the meantime, we made this kind of possible by adding the following CSS:
> @counter-style ol-chiki {
>     system: numeric;
>     symbols: "᱐" "᱑" "᱒" "᱓" "᱔" "᱕" "᱖" "᱗" "᱘" "᱙";
>     suffix: ". ";
> }
> 
> ol:lang( sat ) {
>     list-style-type: ol-chiki;
> }
> 
> This only works in Firefox because the WebKit family doesn't support @counter-style. But on Firefox it appears to do the right thing.

I think it's more practical to put more pressure on browsers which don't support it rather than trying to standardize even more styles, as the latter would likely meet more resistance.

As the person who implemented @counter-style for Firefox, I'm very happy to see that people do find it useful :) And you can probably suggest users visiting those languages to use Firefox instead of WebKit / Blink based browsers to have better experience.

- Xidorn