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

At 05:01 AM 12/21/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>
>Shelby wrote on Friday, December 20, 2002 at 5:43:20 PM:
>
>> My vote is wait for sentence parsing in UA.
>> [...]
>> If you agree, then the next challenge is coming up with a good model
>> for sentence spacing.
>
>I guess I agree, but I'm not so sure it isn't all a pipe dream.


It isn't because natural language sentence parsing is a REQUIREMENT for
translation of language, which is as we know already very important
priority on the web.

There is abundant research in this area:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=natural+
language+sentence+parser


>Assuming for a minute it isn't, one solution seems natural to me: A
>::sentence pseudo-element, similar to ::first-line and ::first-letter.
>Spaces between sentences could be accomplished with padding-right or
>generated content via ::after. If it's required in other languages (I
>only speak English), ::before or padding-left could also be used. With
>padding the spaces won't be copied and it will be impossible to mimic
>exact double spacing, since you have to know what typeface is being
>used to determine how wide its space glyph is. Generated content seems
>better to me (but they should both be allowed, along with other
>appropriate properties).


Off the top of me head (not having enough time to properly consider your
proposal now), I think I prefer a more semantic (by meaning) model for
style since I do not think sentence is content markup.  It is an inferred
semantic entity which is not orthogonal to (independent from) the content
it was inferred from, e.g. the spacing presentation should probably depend
on the fonts used on the content in context and possibly even on the
aliasing of the presentation.  Is this what is meant by "Generated
content"?  Also consider the aural case, then the spacing is probably a
pause time so depends on context timing and inflections.  I will need to
think and study more about this and elaborate later when I get back from
vacation.  I can then read other opinions that have been made here in meantime.

-Shelby Moore

Received on Saturday, 21 December 2002 11:38:15 UTC