- From: Matthew Skala <mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
- Date: Thu, 26 Nov 1998 21:54:47 -0500 (EST)
- To: www-style@w3.org
I'm a newcomer to the list, so apologies if these points have already been covered, but here are two things I'd really like to see in CSS: First: Sentence spacing. I want more horizontal whitespace between sentences than between words in the same sentence. Look at how, in this email message, I've got two ASCII space characters between sentences and only one between words. This has been standard typographic practice for a long time and it makes the text easier to read. At the moment, HTML makes all spaces the same. It makes Web documents unpleasant to read. In order to get the behaviour I want from the current generation of Web browsers, I'd have to insert character entities all over the place. That seems like a bad thing. I realise that i18n issues become significant here because not every language uses the same set of sentence-ending punctuation marks, and also not every period character is the end of a sentence, but it seems to me like it would be easy to have a place to define "characters that signal the end of a sentence if they are immediately followed by whitespace" and another place to define "amount of white space to use after such a character, when it's followed by whitespace". Second: different handling of nested quotes. When I use the <Q> tag several times, I want it to use double quotes for the odd-numbered levels and single quotes for the even-numbered levels. So if I mark up text like this: <Q><Q>What do you mean, <Q>no</Q>?</Q> asked Tom swiftly.</Q> I want to see something like this: "'What do you mean, "no"?' asked Tom swiftly." That is how Lynx renders the <Q> tag, and I consider it the correct behaviour. Even if you can find a style guide that disagrees with me, I'd claim that I should be allowed to make my document appear with the quote levels alternating this way. But my reading of the CSS2 document is that the quote characters for the last defined level of quotes are repeated for all subsequent levels, so it would instead look like: "'What do you mean, 'no'?' asked Tom swiftly." That's not how I want my document to appear. I can work around it by simply defining lots of quote levels in the style sheet, in the alternating pattern I want, but I would prefer to be able to define an infinite number of levels without writing an infinitely long style sheet. A toggle option for "repeat levels from the outside, or by duplicating the last level?" would be good. The third girl had an upside-down penguin on Matthew Skala her stomach, so the doctor told her, "I'll Ansuz BBS examine you for free, if you and your (250) 472-3169 boyfriend will debug my Web server." http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/
Received on Friday, 27 November 1998 00:52:47 UTC