RE: Balanced lines

Glenn,
 
[GA>] I find Al Gilman's follow-on email on the subject of time as the
scarcest resource to be quite interesting and bears further consideration.
 
Al Gilmans post is 'right on the money'. The discussion about line balancing
is a side issue compared to the issue of temporal flow.
 
regards 
John Birch 

The views and opinions expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily

reflect the views and opinions of Screen Subtitling Systems Limited. 

 -----Original Message-----
From: Glenn A. Adams [mailto:glenn@xfsi.com]
Sent: 14 August 2003 14:55
To: Johnb@screen.subtitling.com
Cc: public-tt@w3.org
Subject: RE: Balanced lines



The list of visual style properties enumerated in TT-AF-1-0-REQ requirement
R306 is not intended to be exhaustive, at least in the sense that other
properties would be precluded. So I'm not sure how you derive "effectively
preclude" in the following.
 
I expect that during the process of defining the TT-AF specification, we
will discover derived requirements that cause us to add additional features
not indicated in the requirements document. Beyond that, we will most
certainly provide extensibility mechanisms that permit use of
non-standardized style properties.
 
I can see us adding a line-breaking-strategy property if we need to do so. I
would note that XSL, whose property set we have given preference to, uses an
implied mechanism for determining the line breaking algorithm, e.g., in
Section 7.29.24: "In general, linguistic services (line-justification
strategy, line-breaking and hyphenation) may depend on a combination of the
"language", "script", and "country" properties.".
 
I find Al Gilman's follow-on email on the subject of time as the scarcest
resource to be quite interesting and bears further consideration.
 
G.




  _____  

From: Johnb@screen.subtitling.com [mailto:Johnb@screen.subtitling.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 4:50 AM
To: Glenn A. Adams
Cc: public-tt@w3.org


Glenn 


[GA>]  and I would not expect any AF to DF (distribution format) transcoder
to implement such a feature simply on the basis of cost to benefit ratio.
 
[JB>]
Yet the present set of CSS properties [JB> ] effectively  preclude the use
of 'river control' even if an AF to DF transcoder implements it as a matter
of customer requirement. I notice that the line-break property in CSS3
Candidate Release is commented as follows:
 
"This property selects the set of line breaking rules to be used for text.
The values described below are especially useful to CJK authors, but the
property itself is open to other, not yet specified settings for non-CJK
authors as well. (This is an area for future expansion.)"
 
bold is my emphasis.
 
I wonder if there isn't a window of opportunity to suggest that a 'auto'
value be included for this property - such that the UA can make it's own
choice of line-break strategy? The 'normal' value has no specified behaviour
for non CJK text - but I personally feel that a UA which implemented
river-control for non CJK text for line-break="normal" would be contrary to
most users expectations.
 
regards 
John Birch 

The views and opinions expressed are the author's own and do not necessarily

reflect the views and opinions of Screen Subtitling Systems Limited.