Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-text] Reconsider the initial value of the `text-autospace` property (#12386)

*Hello, a random web developer from Japan here :wave:

I’d like to share my thoughts on the initial value of the `text-autospace` property.

First of all, I believe it’s an overly strong assumption that Japanese authors who *don’t* insert spaces manually (U+0020) also *don’t* want any space between CJK and non-CJK characters. Personally, I never insert manual spaces, but I would still prefer the `text-autospace: normal` behavior. So I’ll definitely opt in to it as soon as it becomes available, regardless of the default.

From a semantic standpoint, manually inserting spaces doesn’t feel right. Among the Japanese authors I know, there’s a shared sentiment that spacing between CJK and non-CJK text is a matter of typesetting, and should not require literal space characters in the source.

In my view, the current practices of adding spaces manually are simply workarounds. The fact that many Japanese authors don’t use those workarounds may not mean they reject spacing—it may just mean they’ve been waiting for better typographic support.

To sum up, I believe that defaulting to text-autospace: normal would better match the intent behind many (if not most) existing Japanese texts that don’t contain manual spaces.

---

By the way, Prettier used to automatically insert spaces between CJK and non-CJK characters when formatting Markdown, but [removed that behavior in v3.0](https://prettier.io/blog/2023/07/05/3.0.0.html#markdown). The discussions around that change may also be relevant to this topic.

---

Side note: I’ve published [a Japanese article on this topic](https://qiita.com/uhyo/items/309bc9ca545797c2b3ee) to help more Japanese developers understand the issue. Many readers have expressed support for the idea that the absence of manual spaces doesn’t imply a lack of desire for typographic spacing.

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by uhyo
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12386#issuecomment-3055696292 using your GitHub account


-- 
Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config

Received on Thursday, 10 July 2025 05:56:29 UTC