Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-inline-3] Improve illustrations for text edges (#11364)

@sciascia yeah I totally understand. Personally, I'm so used to seemingly unusual technical jargon and dept, that I wouldn't mind the names at all. I'd just look up how the spec defines the terms and throw out all my previous intuition about those words in other contexts, haha.

Having said that, I was making suggestions because I had the impression this is relevant. The spec mentions the issue and the issue is still open, you know, I thought I throw in my two cents.

Back to leading. I think, out of the top of my head, I only encountered it when reading the inline module spec. There's really very little in CSS referring to fonts and terms from traditional typesetting unless it's directly font related. And most line and inline related topics also refer to lines, boxes and their heights, not to leading or half leading.

One more thing:

> but why is text-edge: leading; not actually leading?

If I understand this question correctly, you were asking one of multiple things:
 
- Why isn't this setting trimming away everything but CSS half-leading?
- Why isn't this setting trimming away everything but typographic leading?
- Why isn't this setting keeping everything from one edge (whichever) up/down to the typographic leading, instead of CSS half-leading? (Similar to its current definition but using leading instead of half-leading).

And why don't we get all of those options?

I think that's already too many questions to ask for being obvious and self-explanatory 😁 What could `line` mean, other than inline box boundaries? Maybe it could cause confusion between inline boxes and line boxes? But leading would have the same problem.

Anyway, if shipping early matters that much, ignore everything I wrote in here 😁

Ouh and I almost forgot @fantasai, the spec mentions:

> This illustration doesn’t match actual font metrics, it’s actually illustrating the cap-height, not the ascent. [[Issue #11364]](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/11364)

Whereas your OP says it's "conflating", as in "it's hard to tell if the illustration means the `C` or the `d` or both". Maybe someone can fix that note in the spec?

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Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2025 18:41:27 UTC