Re: [css3-writing-modes] before/after terminology alternative?

Hello Fantasai,

On 2012/10/11 1:52, fantasai wrote:
> On 10/04/2012 01:22 AM, "Martin J. Dürst" wrote:
>> Just an additional datapoint in this discussion:
>>
>> I just noticed that CSS already has properties page-break-before and
>> page-break-after (see
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/page.html#page-break-props). Rather
>> obviously, these indicate the same directions as the -before and
>> -after relative direction properties already in XSL-FO, but are
>> orthogonal to the :before and :after pseudo-elements.
>>
>> These seem not to have caused any significant confusion up to now.
>
> Because there is only one axis involved. Imho the main problem isn't
> ::before and ::after, but the fact that, given the set of terms
>
> start, before, end, after
>
> it's not clear, without memorizing it beforehand, which set belongs
> to which axis.

Agreed. This is mostly because we are talking about something abstract, 
not something concrete.

> I raised this particular issue years ago, but nobody
> came up with a sensible alternative until this year. :/

Are you saying that with start, head, end, foot, it's more clear, 
without memorizing it beforehand, which set belongs to which axis? If we 
only think about horizontal, it might be, but in this case, it's crucial 
that this also works with vertical. And if I think e.g. about some 
Japanese vertical text (where the first line is at the right), then it's 
quite easy to guess that head means top, and foot means bottom, and 
therefore start has to be right and end has to be left. But that guess 
would be all wrong.

So rather than using something that lets some people guess things 
correctly some time, but leads people totally astray in other cases, I'd 
prefer words that, while they may have the problem of not inducing the 
right connotations, also don't induce wrong connotations.

Regards,   Martin.


> I'll also note that there's an idea to extend break-before/break-after
> to control inline breaking, in which case they would operate in the
> start-end axis.
>
> Imho before/after make the most sense as "in the DOM axis", whatever
> that happens to be. This is consistent with break-before/break-after,
> consistent with ::before/::after, and consistent with the way we talk
> about the relationship of boxes and elements in the specs. That axis
> is not always parallel to the block axis.
>
> ~fantasai
>
>

Received on Thursday, 11 October 2012 01:45:53 UTC