- From: Liam R. E. Quin <liam@fromoldbooks.org>
- Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2022 11:22:21 -0400
- To: Dave Pawson <dave.pawson@gmail.com>, Brian Kardell <bkardell@gmail.com>
- Cc: public-cssprint@w3.org
On Mon, 2022-10-31 at 13:33 +0000, Dave Pawson wrote: > How much of a moving target is the print element of CSS? > I.e. to use as a target for objectives? > Anyone familiar over time? It's very incomplete, at best working draft with incomplete proposals partly in the specs, but as far as i can tell it's barely moved forward in the past decade. It might be that a useful thing a CG could do would be to take some of those proposals and some of the vendor extensions, and get them spec- ready, and show implementations, whether in browsers or elsewhere. Getting W3C to accept non-browser implementations has proved problematic in the past, and is one reason why some of the work has stalled. I don't know whether there has been any change in that regard, though - it's possible. But just having complete, clear specs for the unfinished functionality would help. There's issues around line-breaking, around CJK formatting, indexing, conditional text (e.g. for cross-references), and css page in general seems very underspecified. For browser support, we've got beyond the point where Netscape was happy to put a page break anywhere, with a line of text chopped in half so the tops of letters appeared on a different page than the bottoms (!), but firefox still splits ligatures in half with an axe when it does line-breaking. Despite all that, the commercial solutions work fairly well. The open source ones tend not to support "advanced features" such as footnotes or multiple columns or page-level floats, but are i think improving. liam -- Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/ Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/ XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting. Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations: http://www.fromoldbooks.org
Received on Monday, 31 October 2022 15:23:29 UTC