Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-inline] better name for initial-letters property

Found this conversation via Jen Simmon's tweet. Here to provide a bit of context on how we approached drop caps in old-school (pre-internet) typography, and hopefully to help guide this discussion a bit from that context.

### Selector
- Drop-caps (or Versals) were a property of paragraph styles, generally denoting the first paragraph in a chapter or section.
- In this case, the selector wouldn't apply to just the first letter of a paragraph, but it should be a property of a span or a block level element (p, or div), and could be applied with p:first-child, p:first-of-type, p:nth-child(), etc.

### Properties
Versals generally had two parameters:
- Number of characters: (First (n) character(s) in a paragraph, or first (n) word(s)) in a paragraph
- Character Height: How many lines did the Versal(s) take up.

### Relevant to this discussion:
In this case, this seems to be a property that's being applied to the existing `::first-letter` pseudo element, which makes the "number of characters" parameter moot.

In an ideal world, this would be styled as
```
p:[selector] {
   versal-line-span: 3;
   versal-char-span: 2;
}
```

because this is being applied to the `::first-letter` pseudo element (or, in the future, I can imagine `::first-nth-letters(3)`), then we can simply use:
```
::first-letter {
  line-span: 3;
}

>From the context of typography, both of these approaches make sense to me.

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Received on Wednesday, 25 July 2018 19:20:44 UTC