- From: Johannes Mutter via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2022 12:14:19 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
> As for ::nth-letter, I am not aware of any substitute, but neither am I aware of strong use cases.
A common use case for nth-letter/ nth-word / etc. are code or more general text editors and annotations for grammar, syntax, spelling, entities (NLP), etc. Which often require overlapping markup (see standoff properties / annotations for more).
In above use cases styling the characters is insufficient: You will also want to register event listener, arbitrary data, … on it. So I’m not convinced an extension of the CSS spec would be a good idea.
Except for using canvas/ CSS Houdini, I currently don’t see a good alternative to using a million span tags that wrap each character. To keep the markup readable I'm storing the plain text string in a data attribute of e.g. a paragraph tag. _(however markup readability shouldn’t be a concern if you can inspect a readable JSON of the content)_
```html
<p aria-description="Hello World">
<span annotations={...}>H</span>
<span annotations={...}>e</span>
<span annotations={...}>l</span>
<span annotations={...}>l</span>
<span annotations={...}>o</span>
...
</p>
```
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Received on Wednesday, 15 June 2022 12:14:21 UTC