- From: Koji Ishii via GitHub <noreply@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2025 08:04:43 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
@myakura Thanks for the very good question. How many of those who don't want ASCII space want no space, and how many want 1/8em or 1/4em space isn't clear. It's probably not possible to know the exact numbers until they started using it, and the numbers may vary case by cases. My best guess is 10% wants no space, 10% wants 1/8em or 1/4em space, 80% don't care. Maybe "don't care" is even more, like 5%, 5%, 90% or more. One of the clear feedback says that they turn it off in their MS Word documents, because there are cases where it's excessively sparse, such as date (e.g., "2025 年 7 月 3 日", this example has 1/6em space). For example, [this Japanese wikipedia page](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:%E4%BB%8A%E6%97%A5%E3%81%AF%E4%BD%95%E3%81%AE%E6%97%A5_7%E6%9C%88) looks too sparse to me with 1/8em space. Turning off for digits can make other cases inconsistent, such as "約4kmの". When either option looks fine in most cases, it makes sense to me to prefer "no space" over "sometimes excessively sparse" or "sometimes inconsistent". It should vary by fonts, the width of the screen, the kind of media, and some other factors because they affect whether "either option looks fine in most cases" stands or not. If it's an e-book, where there are no side bars and the width is wider, long documents such as novels, and well proofread and excessive cases manually fixed by editors, I might prefer the auto-space more. These two different preferences should have been existed since the beginning. I remember there were some feedback to MS Word asking how to turn it off, but it was very low 30 years ago. Looking at the recent data, the ratio has changed in the last 30 years. In 2025, on the web media, I think "on by default" is too aggressive and risky. -- GitHub Notification of comment by kojiishi Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12386#issuecomment-3031290314 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Thursday, 3 July 2025 08:04:44 UTC