[csswg-drafts] [css-text-decor] Proposal for the 'text-emphasis-position' property syntax values

r12a has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts:

== [css-text-decor] Proposal for the 'text-emphasis-position' property syntax values ==
3.4. Emphasis Mark Position: the text-emphasis-position property
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-3/#text-emphasis-position-property

This picks up from a comment sent in email by Momdo Nakamura. See
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Dec/0199.html

Basically Nakamura-san thought that having to always specify two values for text-emphasis-position was painful for the author and unnecessary. I have to agree that i was also surprised by that. It seems it's not only a pain to have to enter double values, but potentially also problematic, since it's unusual to require two values in this way, and i think content authors may forget that they have to do it.

The text in the ED (which i think was changed as a result) says that the values are expressed by:

``` [ over | under ] && [ right | left ]?```

1. i'm not sure that this is grammatically correct – the `&&` means that both must occur, but the `?` means that one doesn't have to occur.  Doesn't the `&&` symbol need to become `||` ?
2. i have a nagging worry about relying on the browser default stylesheet to produce something sensible, since i think it should be possible to use a similar model for other formats that may not interact with a browser default stylesheet. (For example, TTML2)
3. `over` and `under` mean all sorts of things in CSS at the moment, and i found myself wishing there was a little more standardisation recently, when trying to explain things that cut across text-decoration, ruby, and writing-modes.
4. a propos (3), writing-modes defines `over` to mean on the 'ascender side' of vertical text, rather than block-before. This seems a useful approach wrt naming values that could be used also for line-decoration surely?  That way there would only need to be two values `over` and `under`.  (Of course there's a clash with the existing `under` value name, but that could be fixed by using `line-over` or `line-under` (which are less ambiguous anyway), or changing current `under` to something like `clear`.

There may well be things i'm missing here. Please let me know if so.

Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1207 using your GitHub account

Received on Tuesday, 11 April 2017 18:52:27 UTC