- From: saku via GitHub <noreply@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2025 15:19:30 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
Thank you for pinging me @nt1m and starting this meaningful discussion concerning East Asian writing styles! Let me do a quick sum up. ## Summary of the Discussion So Far - Backward compatibility: Most existing CJK content already uses manual ASCII spaces, so normal wouldn't benefit them without the replace keyword - Performance concerns: Non-Latin, non-CJK scripts face 1-5% layout performance hits with no benefits if normal is set - Future authoring: Providing "better" defaults for future authors/readers/users vs. maintaining conservative defaults and opt-in if needed - Safari shipped with `no-autospace` as a conservative step, while the spec defines normal - Chrome 139 is shipping with `normal` according to the current spec, which has a tailored default for the users They are what I understood so far conversation, and now I'd like to contribute my perspective on the appropriate default value. ## My Point of View I see this as fundamentally a question about whose experience we're optimizing for: - established content creators who follow traditional style guides, or - the broader population of web users who create content today. I do understand that there're performance issues or backwards-and-forwards compatibility concerns to reason and solve this topic, but I believe the sociological changes in web content creation is inevitable. Since the Web became ubiquitous and mobile devices democratized content creation, millions of people who aren't familiar with traditional style guides now publish content online. Many of these users have high possibility that they never encountered the 1980s conventions of inserting spaces between CJK and Western characters. I believe that this shift in user demographics may have influenced the [JETF style guide revision in 2019](https://www.jtf.jp/tips/styleguide) as @kojiishi mentioned earlier. (Speaking personally, I wasn't aware of the traditional spacing convention until university. When I first read academic papers with spaces between Japanese and Western characters, I found it a bit surprising rather than natural. We've grown up reading and writing content without these spaces on social media, messaging apps et cetra before academic. (I acknowledge this is subjective opinion, which is why I'm currently conducting a little survey to gather quantitative data on contemporary spacing preferences among Japanese web users.)) --- While I agree that backward compatibility and performance are technical concerns in favour of setting `no-autospace` as the default, I believe the 'unknown human-side reason' could also be prioritised more. If we can only "assume" or are "unsure" of the facts, I feel we should respect the organic evolution. This doesn't prevent those who prefer traditional spacing from opting in with `text-autospace: normal`—it simply ensures the default matches what most users already expect and gives more capability for people who want to use spacing style! I believe this could help to ground our decision in actual user behaviour rather than assumptions. -- GitHub Notification of comment by sakupi01 Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/12386#issuecomment-3005178363 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Wednesday, 25 June 2025 15:19:31 UTC