Re: [css-text] I18N-ISSUE-319: word-break 'according to usual rules'

On 04/20/2014 10:09 AM, Koji Ishii wrote:
> On Jan 25, 2014, at 3:24 AM, Phillips, Addison <addison@lab126.com> wrote:
>>     5.3. Breaking Rules for Letters: the ‘word-break’ property
>>     http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-css-text-3-20131010/#word-break-property
>>
>>     "Words break according to their usual rules.
>>
>>     If I understand correctly, it's not *words* that are breaking
>>     according to usual rules, but *text*.
>>     It may be worth clarifying that the 'usual rules' means basically
>>     according to UAX14 and the behaviour is therefore script dependent.
>
> Hm, the text looks bad, but it’s a little hard to re-write as we already say:
> | CSS does not fully define where soft wrap opportunities occur,
> | however some controls are provided to distinguish common variations.
>
> I tried this text:
> | Soft wrap opportunities are as defined above.
> which links to where we refer to UAX14.
>
> Does this look ok?

Well, the reason the text was talking about words was because 'word-break'
only controls line-breaking of words, not anything to do with punctuation.
It basically has three options for whether you break "within words":
   - break within CJK "words", but not other "words"
   - break within any kind of "words"
   - don't break within any kind of "words"

To clarify this, I've adjusted the description of the property, adding
a second sentence and a reference to 'line-break':

   # This property specifies soft wrap opportunities between letters,
   # i.e. where it is “normal” and permissible to break lines of text.
   # It does not affect rules governing the soft wrap opportunities
   # created by spaces and punctuation. (See line-break for controls
   # affecting punctuation.)

Wrt ''normal'', I've adjusted its description to say:

   # Words break according to their customary rules, as described above.
   # Korean, which commonly exhibits two different behaviors, allows
   # breaks between any two consecutive Hangul/Hanja.

This text
   - maintains some text that describes 'normal' as the way text
     normally behaves wrt breaking
   - keeps the up-reference to the description that Koji added
   - clarifies the one case (that I know of) where CSS needs to make
     a distinction between two common line-breaking behaviors

I also tried to work in the description I just gave of the three
options above into the text of each option, to help give a high-level
understanding of what they do. The downside is that “word” in this
sense is questionably-defined (so I put it in scare-quotes). :/

Here is the updated spec:
   http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-text/#word-break-property

Let me know if that works. Hopefully it also helps address some
of the confusion between 'word-break' and 'line-break'.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 18 June 2014 16:08:23 UTC