[css-text] Add text-justify: inter-character back for Korean?

First, because this is very easy to confuse, allow me to clarify that this is a different topic from another one on this list on justification algorithm. Another one is about an algorithm when lang is unknown. This is about when lang=ko (Korean).

I’d like to propose to add text-justify: inter-character back. We removed this because at that point we assumed that lang tag can cover all the cases inter-character would do, but the feedbacks from Korean community[1][2] indicates the need for inter-character.

There are 3 types of Korean documents:
1. Ideographic only, ancient documents (may sometimes contain some hangul characters.)
2. Mostly Hangul, a few to some ideographic characters per a paragraph or a page.
3. All Hangul, no ideographic characters.

and the ratio of these documents are 1:20:80 or 10:20:70 (vary by people.)

With this in mind, we have 4 options for documents with lang=ko:
1. Make both Hangul and ideographic expandable if lang=ko. Authors have to add "text-justify: inter-word” to 90-99% of documents (#2 and #3.)
2. Make both Hangul and ideographic non-expandable if lang=ko. #1 documents cannot be justified unless we add inter-character back.
3. Make both Hangul and ideographic non-expandable if lang=ko. Tag #1 documents as “zh”.
4. Make Hangul non-expandable and ideographic expandable if lang=ko. Logically it’s strange to handle Hangul and ideographic differently, but authors don’t have to add text-justify to 80% of documents (#1 and #3). 20% (#2) needs to add text-justify: inter-word.

Option 3 is very wrong, and disliked by the Korean community[2]. Option 1 is hard to take because it’s likely to break a lot of existing documents on the web.

Both option 2 and 4 are technically possible, but to me, option 2 makes the most sense, and that option requires inter-character.

Thoughts?

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-i18n-cjk/2014JulSep/0003.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-i18n-cjk/2014JulSep/att-0007/00-part

/koji

Received on Saturday, 26 July 2014 18:54:18 UTC