Re: Proposal: "text-transform" property revision

I don't think it is any further out of line with CSS purpose than the  
other text transformation values that exist today ("capitalize",  
"uppercase", "lowercase"). It would add one more value that would be  
just as useful as the other three, IMO. I suppose you could make a  
case that they should all be done away with, but as long as we have  
the three values, then why not the fourth?

Speaking for myself, I have had on several occasions been involved in  
co-branded sites where I could provide a style sheet for the other  
site to link to, but could not change any of the data itself. If  
those other sites, which I wanted to conform stylistically with my  
own, decided on all caps, there was really nothing I could do about  
it to make them Title Case. On the other hand, if my site had used  
all caps for the headlines, lets say, then I could have used a style  
sheet rule to make their headlines all caps as well. Magic, but only  
in one direction, and this new keyword would provide more parity.

By the way, I have had occasion to create sentence case out of ALL  
CAPS in such a situation, by using { text-transform: lowercase; }  
and :first-letter { text-transform: uppercase; }. A title-case  
keyword (or equivalent) would have been better, if available, as  
there were a limited number of headlines, which contained no  
initializes or proper names.


On Oct 9, 2007, at 4:12 PM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis wrote:

>
> Brad Kemper wrote:
>
>> Paul, that is a good argument not to use it that way all the time,  
>> and perhaps not on BBC headlines, but there are probably a lot of  
>> situations to be able to lowercase the letters first, before  
>> capitalizing them.
>> For instance, I  often have to deal with a system that stores all  
>> of its data in ALL CAPS, and I use VBscript on the server right  
>> now to make them lowercase and then Initial Capped. It does mess  
>> up a few things like initialisms, but it is more acceptable than  
>> the alternative, at least for me with that (limited) particular  
>> usage.
>
> I'm confused. Why would we want to first lowercase and then  
> capitalize all initials in the CSS layer? CSS should be styling not  
> data cleaning, so shouldn't the HTML layer contain the text in a  
> "naturalized" form of capitalization, with necessary data cleaning  
> performed on the server?
>
> --
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 10 October 2007 04:25:11 UTC