RE: first-word pseudo-element

And, in fact, it's somewhat contradictory, because CSS already claims to
know what a "word" is, at least in some contexts - due to the
'word-spacing' property.  :^)

That said, ":first-word" would be a one-off.  I'd be much more
interested in a ":first-n-words" and ":first-n-letters".

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter S. Linss [mailto:peter@linss.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 9:44 AM
To: Daniel Glazman
Cc: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: first-word pseudo-element


And that answer always bothered me. I accept that a UA can't always
determine
what a word is (or that the selected element may not even contain
words), but so
what? Why can't the pseudo element simply be defined to only apply to
those
elements where the UA can determine what a word is? (and maybe define a
word in
the cases where it can be defined, or at least make a note that UAs
should be
careful about what languages they apply this selector to, so that they
don't
just look for spaces in Japanese text, for instance)

Not all of CSS makes sense in all circumstances, it's unnecessarily
limiting to
try to pretend that it has to. What does the ::first-line selector
select in an
audio-only presentation?

Daniel Glazman wrote:

> andrew.robertson@capitaes.co.uk wrote:
>
> >Would there be any benefit in adding a :first-word pseudo element to
format
> >the first word of a paragraph, to the CSS3 spec?
> >
> It is an old question, posted in this mailing-list ona  regular basis.
> My answer, posted also on a regular basis, is the following one : what
> is a word ? In our western languages and writings, it is quite easy
(but
> not always) to determine it.
> Now think of asian languages and writing systems, sometimes without
> punctuation, or think of a text mixing writing systems, ...
>
> </Daniel>

Received on Thursday, 17 May 2001 13:52:57 UTC