Re: [CSSWG] Minutes and Resolutions TPAC F2F 2009-11-02: text-overflow

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 12:42 PM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>wrote:

> Alex Mogilevsky wrote:
>
>> Some of the discussion on ellipsis in bidi has continued later, and it
>> seemed
>> to be a general consensus that "physical" clipping (removing text as if it
>> was
>> scrolled beyond the ellipsis) is preferred to "logical" (removing text
>> that
>> wouldn't if remeasured in reduced width -- this may remove text from the
>> middle
>> of the line). Most existing implementations do "physical" clipping; IE8
>> does
>> "logical".
>>
>
> This makes sense to me.
>

That is definitely my preference too.

There is one thing not mentioned in the minutes that perhaps people weren't
aware of, which is important: in all the implementations I've tested, the
style of the ellipsis is the style of the block that specifies
text-overflow, not the style of the inline element where the ellipsis
"appears", and IIRC that's what the spec used to say. This means that it
doesn't make sense in general to shape the ellipsis along with the text next
to it (e.g. to form a ligature), because they could have different fonts.
It's certainly not something I'd want to implement, even if we special-case
the case where they're the same font and size. For the same reason it's a
bit misleading to talk about "replacing the last character(s) with an
ellipsis". It also doesn't really make sense to select the ellipsis along
with the text. If we want to treat the ellipsis as if it was part of the
text, we should do that more thoroughly by rendering the ellipsis in the
style of the text it's adjacent to. But I don't think we should do that.

As for the scrolling discussion, it seems obvious to me that if the
container is overflow:scroll you should be able to scroll more text into
view with the ellipsis hanging at the right edge of the container as long as
it's needed. I can't think of any use case where you'd want the ellipsis to
stay in the same place in the text with an increasing amount of space
between it and the right edge of the container as you scroll.

Rob
-- 
"He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are
healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his
own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." [Isaiah
53:5-6]