Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-page-3] Add orientation descriptor (#4491)

> The orientation descriptor is just for printed output.

As far as I can tell from your use-case description and described behavior, it's the exact opposite. From your description of the use-case, it's for when you're rendering to a PDF or other page-based *screen* media. In the case you described, all the pages are `size: portrait` already, and thus suitable for immediately printing with no additional work; you use `orientation` to get the supposed-to-be-landscape pages to be shown in landscape *on screen*.

My suggested inversion was the "just for printed output" version, where screen/PDF display works correctly by default (by using `size` properly), and then you use `margin-orientation` to rotate how the margins are laid out so they're in a desirable spot when printing.

(@faceless2 hits on this independently, realizing that the semantics they find reasonable are the opposite of what's being presented here.)

> To support size: landscape properly without violating specs is very difficult, and a multi-year project for Chromium.

Okay, *that's* a completely different use-case, and one we can talk about reasonably, but has nothing to do with the other use-cases based on observable behavior of a conforming implementation.

If the use-case is "we don't expect to ever actually implement `@page { size: ...; }`, at least not for a very long time, but we'd like to be able to have pages that are hacking in landscape-orientation by rendering sideways be oriented 'as intended' when printed to PDF", then the described approach might be reasonable. But then I'd want to be much, much clearer that this is a temporary solution that has better technical solutions that just haven't been implemented yet, and would claim a scarier and less generic name for the property as a result. `orientation` is definitely not an appropriate name for this sort of "feature B to deal with the fact that feature A isn't implemented" feature.

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Received on Tuesday, 25 February 2020 23:30:34 UTC