RE: text direction and CSS

Wow! That's a really nice WD. I'll have to bookmark that one.
A lot more complete than my suggestion, and some of the
miscellaneous text formatting properties would be useful in
any language, especially in tabular data.

I have a couple of suggestions about the content of the draft,
one technical correction, and a small miscellaneous comment.

First, the suggestions:

- First, Japanese line breaks are a little more complicated than
that. Breaking inside a katakana string is okay, but hiragana
is mostly used for word endings and particles (conjugation,
declention, etc.) and in that case should be associated with
the preceding kanji. In other words, the line should never break
before a hiragana character unless the preceding character is
a katakana character.

- Second, layout-grid-char seems to duplicate letter-spacing. I
understand why you wouldn't want to use line-height instead
of layout-grid-line for spacing between lines, since line-height
implies a vertical dimension. However, letter-spacing doesn't
imply anything other than "between letters." It might be simpler
(for authors at least) to just redefine letter-spacing's behavior to
take the grid into account if layout-grid-mode is not set to "none."

The layout-grid property would then be shorthand for
layout-grid-mode, layout-grid-type, layout-grid-line, and
letter-spacing.

And now the technical stuff (Yeah, I know it's just a working
draft, but I figure it's safer to be nitpicky now rather than
letting some mistakes into a more official document):

In the notes for section 3.6 (layout-grid shorthand property),
the second example reads:

DIV.section1 { layout-grid: strict line .5in 20% }

However, this puts the layout-grid-type value and 
layout-grid-mode value in reverse order to how the property
is defined earlier.

And finally, In the section on tate-chu-yoku text, it might
make more sense to use a lang type selector rather than
an inline style just to be consistent. That's the sort of thing
language selectors are for, right?

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Nir Dagan [SMTP:nir@nirdagan.com]
> Sent:	Wednesday, August 11, 1999 7:03 AM
> To:	gwalla@sfgate.com
> Cc:	www-style@w3.org
> Subject:	Re: text direction and CSS
> 
> See http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-i18n-format/
> for CSS properties needed in non-Latin scripts 
> including Japanese.
> 
> Garth Wallace wrote:
> 
> "Just wanted to point out that the CSS2 text-direction
> property doesn't cover vertical languages like Japanese
> (lines go top to bottom, next line to the left)...."
> 
> regards
> Nir Dagan
> 
> http://www.nirdagan.com
> mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
> tel:+972-2-588-3143
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 11 August 1999 15:43:39 UTC