RE: Suggestion to add "spacing between sentences" to CSS3 Line WD

The issue is not the concept of sentence (although it is by itself
somewhat fuzzy as after all in English you can use ';' to put together
two very differents assertion in a single 'sentence'). But how you mark
it.
Some writing systems like Thai, Lao, Khmer and possibly Myanmar don't
really express clearly the concept through a specific character,
although typically the space character may be used in a loosely manner.

You don't have to invoke Martian to get in trouble here, most of the
languages that don't use space as a word separator would get you in
trouble, and obviously any use of mixed writing systems quotes would
even make matters more difficult.

The concept of 'word' is already problematic in many scripts/writing
systems (such as Chinese or Japanese). Trying to detect a sentence
boundary and style it is extremely problematic. Even in English with the
100K+ characters present in Unicode there are many ways to end a
sentence.

Michel Suignard

-----Original Message-----
From: Shelby Moore [mailto:shelby@coolpage.com] 
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2002 2:36 PM
To: David Woolley
Cc: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: Suggestion to add "spacing between sentences" to CSS3 Line
WD




>> Define "sentence".
>

>What he is saying is that CSS is not just for English, or western 
>European languages, so you can't add rules for such languages without 
>generalising them to all languages.

I already wrote, "Obviously your point must be that 'sentence' will be
different in different languages, but so are many other things in CSS."

I speak some Malay languages, and afaik all languages have the concept
of a sentence.

I was just suggesting that it would be better to have intER-sentence
spacing style than have a bunch of web pages with double   between
sentences.  If you feel some obscure Martian language is more important
than that, then I yield to your "expert" priorities.

-Shelby Moore

Received on Monday, 16 December 2002 17:59:17 UTC