Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-text] Add new CSS text-transform values for math (#3745)

In school and university, I was exposed to several approaches to styling vectors, all of them conventionally using a single lowercase roman letter:

- rightwards arrow above
- underlined, horizontal line below
- broken, blackletter: handwritten Sütterlin or printed Fraktur
- italic (print only)
- no special styling at all (but, like scalar variables, always lowercase, while matrices use uppercase letters) 

There are probably other customs as well.

As an author, I would expect to have all of these choices in a single location or in a unicorn way: 

- hard-coding the character code point(s), perhaps with character entity references
- choosing a dedicated markup element type or attribute value for each instance, e. g. `<var font=blackletter>`
- defining a central style for certain semantic markup like `<vector>`

CSS is obviously hardly concerned with the first of these three options and best suited for the third one. It can be used as the (overridable) backbone for the second variant as well.

The first variant, Unicode, has all cases covered, either using the infamous math alphabets from SMP or combining diacritics like U+20D7 and U+0331.
The second variant very much depends on capabilities of the markup language, CSS-wise it is identical to the third variant, just using different selectors. 
The final variant, which is on topic here, lacks support for adding an arrow above. Underlines are considered text decoration, casing is text transformation, italic face a font variant and blackletter a font family.
This feature request, if accepted by the WG, seeks to unify the final three styles inside `text-transform`, while underlines remain in a separate property (which is intended for runs of characters, not isolated ones) and arrows would still not be possible at all (as far as I know).

I guess that makes sense, but also constitutes an argument to make `text-transform` even more powerful – as in @frivoalʼs stale proposal.

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Received on Tuesday, 26 March 2019 09:25:46 UTC