Re: CSS 4.1 proposal: text-transform:continental

 > Thus I propose:
 >
 >  property: text-transform
 > new value: continental
 >
 > 'continental'
 >     Replaces some characters of each word with letterform variants or
 > equivalents with decorative accents.

In the same vein, and on the principle that CSS, as an international 
standard, should cater for as many communities and cultures as possible, 
I additionally propose the following:


  property: text-transform
new value: l33t

'l33t'
     Replaces the letters O, L, E, A, S, T, and B with the digits 0, 1, 
3, 4, 5, 7 and 8. Implementations MAY also apply a random capitalisation 
transform to the remaining letters, and/or replace particular words with 
one of their common mis-spellings as an initial step.

   *Notes*

I appreciate that this proposal involves the use of a numerical value 
for a property without an accompanying unit, for which I can only beg 
forgiveness; however, as far as I can tell, this is permitted by the 
grammar.

It is also interesting to note that conforming implementations would not 
have to always produce exactly the same output from a constant input, or 
the same output as each other. It could be argued that this will cause 
interoperability problems; however, I believe that there is a real-world 
precedent for this in the form of dialects and accents in human language.

   *Previous Implementations*

A more complicated form of the algorithm has been implemented already, 
although with the significant disadvantage that it only works in batch mode:
http://www.ryanross.net/leet/
http://www.geocities.com/mnstr_2000/translate.html

An on-the-fly implementation has also been demonstrated, although 
documentation is sketchy:
http://www.insanely-great.com/infobank/machack00/hacks.html

   *Areas for Discussion*

I would also like to canvass opinion about the usefulness of the 
more-involved "h@x0r" transform, which would build upon "l33t" to 
include punctuation and other non-alphanumeric characters in the target 
set.


Humbly submitted,

Gerv

Received on Wednesday, 2 April 2003 03:00:21 UTC