Re: Cougar comments

On Fri, 9 May 1997, Brian Kelly wrote:

> 2.  SPAN

> (b) Also the name seems to infer 'spanning' of elements which clearly 
> (if SGML integrity is to be maintained) is not true.

It's 'spanning' characters, basically. When this was decided upon,
the CSS group had proposed <C> in parallel with <P>, but I told them
that it would lead to misunderstandings, as <P> is a single paragraph
(or a paragraph separator), and <SPAN> is several characters. So that's
why we settled on <SPAN>.


> (c) versus DIV - if one uses SPAN within P and DIV outside P to do the 
> samwe thing then we are in real doo-doo!! Hence to whole of 
> 'within-element' style control needs more thought.

Most style control mechanisms currently distinguish between paragraph-
level and character-level attributes, and also between the respective
assigning mechanisms. BIDI is only one example, there are many others.
Also, if <DIV> could appear inside <P>, <P> would always have to be
closed off (which is not true for legacy HTML) and in addition, <DIV>
again could contain <P>, so that we would have <P> inside <P>.


> 6. Internationalization (i18n)
> 
> Inclusion of soft-hyphen - this will be very useful, but it opens the 
> door to the general inclusion of language-dependent hyphenation rules. 
> For example: I assume that a word that includes &shy; can ONLY be 
> hyphenated at &shy;, in which case a word that starts or ends with 
> &shy; cannot be hyphenated at all. And, so it will go on!! The WD on 
> i18n needs to cover language-depenedent hyphenation issues.

There are various aspects to the problem of hyphenation. Soft-hyphen
is not included by &shy;, but by its existence in iso-8859-1.
Soft-hyphen covers the vast bulk of cases in all languages that use
hyphenation. It would of course be nice if some more cases could
be covered, but they need rather complex syntax on which there
hasn't been agreement yet.

Apart from cases where hyphenation cannot be derived from language
(re-cord vs. rec-ord), irregular cases such as the German (Zucker->
Zuk-ker), and languages where no hypen is used, do you know any
special cases that would need to be covered?

Regards,	Martin.

Received on Saturday, 10 May 1997 11:44:51 UTC