[css3-transforms] skew(<angle>[, <angle>]) (again)

Hallo,

surprisingly in the new draft the transformation skew(<angle>[, <angle>])
appears again. 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-css3-transforms-20120228/#two-d-transform-functions

It was already discussed and clarified, that at least the naming is 
misleading, because the formula, that defines this behaviour now is
a mixture of scaling and skewing (in general the determinant is not
1 as for skewing necessary).
Therefore this transformation was already removed from a previous draft
( http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2009Mar/0287.html
and following comments).

At least now there is a formula at all for this kind of transformation,
but it is still not related to skewing or shearing - no progress in the past 
years finally, looks like a regression, this problem was already known as
the reason, why this transformation was removed.

Therefore I propose to do one of the following actions:
a) If there is no indication, that such a transformation is of practical use, 
remove it again, because is is useless.
b) If there is an indication, that such a transformation is of practical use,
rename it, for example to something like 'scaleAndSkew',  'scaw',  'warp',
'distort', 'noSkew' or 'weks' to avoid further confusion and obfuscation.
c) Replace the formula with something more useful for authors, for example
a skewing in an arbitrary direction.  This would be comparable with the
option of rotate to provide the rotation center. Here one could rotate
the intended axis in the x-axis, do a skewX and rotate everything back
again.
This was already proposed as a meaningful interpretation of such a
skew transform with two angles:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2009Dec/0124.html

Best wishes

Olaf Hoffmann

Received on Wednesday, 7 March 2012 13:11:30 UTC