Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-text-4] Don't provide a language parameter for word-boundary-detection (#7193)

I fully, 100%, absolutely agree with the OP here. In fact, before seeing this issue, I just sent an email to a colleague suggesting this, and describing why the current behavior doesn’t make any sense.

From my email:
> The worst thing that can happen if the browser doesn’t have a dictionary for a particular language is that it falls back to the default behavior of boundary analysis (as-if word-boundary-detection wasn’t specified at all). …
> 
> I don’t know of any other text layout system which has this language based range behavior. In every other publishing system I’ve seen, this dictionary-based approach is either (a) automatically enabled and always on, or (b) an opt-in with a single boolean switch.

I honestly don’t understand the backwards-compatibility story described above in this thread. If a publishing house cares very much about exactly where their line breaks are, they won’t use this property, because different browsers and OSes will implement it differently. Therefore, it’s totally OK if this property has progressive enhancement; the author doesn’t know where the line breaks will be anyway - they are just telling the browser “do your best to improve the quality, possibly at the expense of performance.”

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Received on Saturday, 10 June 2023 20:49:11 UTC