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

Richard Ishida wrote:
>Fantasai wrote:
>>Proposed:
>>   word-break: keep-all | strict | normal | break-all
>>
>>Justification:
>>   Practically-speaking, there's only one scale of strictness.
>>                   strictest <----------------------> loosest
>>   line-break     | irrelevant | strict | normal | normal    |
>>   word-break-cjk | keep-all   | normal | normal | break-all |
>>
>>   * normal vs. strict line-breaking is irrelevant when keep-all takes effect.
>>   * The combination of strict and break-all makes little sense. (Why
>>     would you allow breaks in scripts like Latin, where breaking words
>>     in random places is wrong, but disallow breaks before small kana,
>>     where breaking is merely discouraged?)
> 
> I disagree with your recommendations here. I don't see there being one scale
> of strictness at all, and think that your approach is too biased towards the
> Western view.
...
> The word-break-cjk alternatives are not a question of scale of breakability
> in my mind. It relates to the application of character vs word wrapping
> paradigms to runs of CJK vs non-CJK text...
> The effects of the line-break property are a different issue, not part of the
> same scale of breakability: Where CJK text breaks on a character basis, do we
> apply the kinsoku/geumchik/other rules, and if so, to what extent... It's
> just that such rules don't apply to the non-CJK, because they are based on
> specific Asian characters.

Do the line-break and word-break-cjk properties need to cascade independently
or is this redefinition of 'word-break' sufficient?

    Property    ||              Equivalent to
                ||
  word-break    ||      line-break     word-break-cjk
===============||=======================================
  keep-all      ||          -          keep-all
  normal        ||        strict       normal
  loose         ||        normal       normal
  break-strict  ||        strict       break-all
  break-all     ||        normal       break-all


> I *do* have the following issues with the current CSS text:
> 
...
> [2] re line-break: Kinsoku rules cover much more than just splitting small
> kana.  I don't think this is clearly described in the text.  Nor is it clear
> that this is applicable to Chinese and Korean text, as well as Japanese. Nor
> that the kana question is not relevant in Chinese or Korean text.

If you could provide some pointers to information on line breaking rules for
any of these languages, I will do my best to add details to the spec. I've
tried looking, but much of the literature is in Japanese, which I unfortunately
can't read. (My Chinese isn't up to the task, either, but I could handle French
if necessary...)

> [3] I think there ought to be a third alternative for line-break: none.  This
> would turn off line breaking restrictions.  There are occasions where I might
> want to do that.

This can be done with the text-wrapping properties. 'word-break' defines the
"word" (wrt line breaking) boundaries, and 'text-wrap' indicates whether to
respect the word boundaries when wrapping lines.

> [4] I think it would be easier to understand the properties on an initial
> read if word-break-cjk was introduced before line-break, since that provides
> a more top-down approach. I also think that line-break is to cjk what
> word-break-inside is to some non-CJK scripts, so it makes sense to explain
> those alongside each other.

Ok, I'll remember to invert the order.

~fantasai

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Received on Thursday, 21 October 2004 07:07:58 UTC