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

Thank you @uhyo for the feedback.

Seeing more opinions wanting to turn it on is really great and helpful, thank you. It helps us to prove that our efforts to discuss, write specs, and implement for over decades is the right thing. I hope it also helps raising the priority of this feature for other browsers.

Forcing it on by default is a different topic. It means that we ignore authors who don't want the space. It means that we require users who don't want it to install extensions. It means that we don't care slowing down pages of other scripts, such as Arabic, Thai, Devanagari, etc.

Before, these negative impacts were thought to be little-to-none. But recent data and discussions discovered that there are real negative impacts.

Maybe there are more people who thinks it's a positive impact than who thinks it's a negative impact, I don't have the exact data at this point. But when authors and users who hit the negative impact is not little-to-none, I don't think changing the default rendering is the right way to go.

Safari has shipped it in March, and Chromium-based browsers will ship it soon too. If you want the spacing, please add `text-autospace: normal` to your pages. Doing so will give us [more data](https://chromestatus.com/metrics/css/timeline/popularity/767). I can see it rising since Safari has shipped, but it's still low.

Note, the data includes both `normal` and `no-autospace`. I found some pages already added `no-autospace` to protect their pages from changing in case any browsers turn it on by default, so it might help us better to add a separate counter for `normal`.

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Received on Sunday, 13 July 2025 06:59:51 UTC