RE: Revising text wrapping, line breaking, and white space properties in CSS3 (CSS3 Text: 6 and 7)

Hello Richard,

> For what it's worth, I made a quick summary of my suggestions in
> the past few notes wrt properties and values for white space and
> text wrapping, using my preferred names, and in the order in
> which I think they should be introduced in the spec (to aid
> reader's understanding).  It looked like this:
>
> white-space-handling: discard | preserve | auto-collapse-breaks
> | space-collapse-breaks | zero-width-collapse-breaks |
> discard-breaks | preserve-breaks
>
> wrap-option: wrap | no-wrap | simple-wrap | long-word-wrap |
> keep-all-words | break-all-words
>
> cjk-line-break:
> normal | strict | none
>
> hyphenation:
> none | hyphenate

I have three unrelated things to say on this.

1. In terms of the nomenclature, words like "option" and "handling" add no
meaning in this context. Brevity is very important. The following (and
similar) are examples of words that, in my view, should not be included in
property or value names because they add no meaning:

option, choice, alternative, preference, pref, configuration, config,
setting, set, selection, select, handling, treatment, control, manage.

In a style sheet, *every* property sets, configures, provides options,
handles, and controls (etc.).

Probably there is a W3C document that provides guidelines for
nomenclature. If so, I hope it would take a similar view.

Maybe some further brainstorming would provide more-useful names? In the
spirit of brainstorming, maybe instead of "wrap-option", maybe word-wrap,
line-wrap, or text-wrap. And instead of "white-space-handling", maybe
spaces, or space-chars.


2. I am not fully informed on the details of your proposal, but I wonder
whether some of this can't be included in the existing white-space
property. I think it would be worth revisiting this conclusion:

> (it's a shame that white-space is already taken)


3. Additional hyphenation options would be nice, but maybe they will have
to wait. Adobe FrameMaker, for example, provides an "Allow Line Breaks
After" feature that allows the user to specify (type in) characters after
which lines are allowed to break (typically hyphen, dashes, slashes).


Larry Israel
Fireteam Consulting
http://larry.israel.name/webdev/

Received on Sunday, 17 October 2004 20:26:42 UTC