- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:45:07 +0000 (UTC)
On Thu, 12 May 2011, Charles Pritchard wrote:
> >
> > Their intent is to ensure that when you have a specific amount of
> > space in which text has to fit, and you don't know exactly what that
> > space is or you don't know exactly what the text is, you can easily
> > work around minor cases of limited space. For example, I use it on the
> > issues chart:
>
> There's no guarantee of legibility
There's never any guarantee of anything. However, within reason this can
maintain legibility.
> there's no exposure as to the actual size of the font being used.
Indeed typically the text would be squeezed, not made smaler.
> It's not (or was not, in the recent past) implemented in many browsers.
IE9, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox all seem to implement it.
> It serves only minor cases. It's unnecessary.
It serves pretty much every time you want to put text on a label and are
pretty sure it'll fit, but it might go slightly over.
> Yes, you can use TextMetrics. So why have this added bloat?
Convenience. This is a trivial cost for significant convenience.
> Most of your philosophy regarding the Canvas API has been to keep out
> unnecessary and unimplemented items. I don't see how this one is any
> different.
It changes multiple lines of code which most authors wouldn't write into
an additional trivial argument that greatly improves the UI. I think
that's a pretty good deal.
> If it were intended, to be more useful, I'd want to see it in
> measureText as well, so that measureText('string', maxWidth) would
> return a font size attribute.
We'll be improving measureText's metrics in due course.
> Your use case, in your data chart, could quite easily have been written
> up without the added attribute. That's why I'm bringing this up.
It could have been done, but I probably wouldn't have bothered if it
wasn't an extra argument.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Thursday, 15 December 2011 15:45:07 UTC