- From: jfkthame via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2023 12:51:11 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
jfkthame has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts: == [css-text] Interaction of `text-wrap-style: balance` and fragmentation == The spec for [`text-wrap-style: balance`](https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-4/#valdef-text-wrap-style-balance) does not say anything about how it interacts with fragmentation, but I think it probably should. What happens when a block with, say, four lines of text and `text -wrap-style: balance` applied is broken across pages? The point of `balance` is to improve the visual appearance of the block as a whole by harmonizing its line lengths (as far as possible), but if the block is broken into two (or more!) fragments, they are probably not visually adjacent and I'm not sure "balancing" the entire block makes much sense. The implementation of `balance` [recently landed in Gecko](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1731541) explicitly disables balancing for fragmented blocks. This is at least easy to understand, and probably won't interfere with most real-world uses of `balance`, but might sometimes be a frustrating limitation. Experimentation indicates that Blink's current behavior is (IMO) a bit weird: when the block is fragmented, the first fragment gets the line-breaks that would result from applying `balance` to the entire (unfragmented) block (so e.g. what appears on the first page is affected by how full the lines on the second page would have been); but the subsequent fragment(s) get the default greedy line-breaking applied to whatever text was left. What behavior do we actually want here? I can think of a few possibilities that could make sense to authors: (1) `balance` does not apply to fragmented blocks (2) `balance` applies before fragmentation, and fragmentation does not affect its outcome (3) `balance` applies after fragmentation, so the lines within each fragment are balanced independently My gut feeling is that (3) would be the most desirable behavior, but it may be trickier to implement and I'm not sure the use case (balancing lines in blocks that are being fragmented) is strong enough to warrant a more complex implementation. (1) is what Gecko's initial implementation does. Blink seems to start out trying to do (2), but then re-wraps the content after the fragmentation break, which doesn't make sense to me. Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/9431 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Monday, 2 October 2023 12:51:13 UTC