[css3-text] Proposal to add "text-decoration-skip: decoration-boundary"

(Derived from a suggestion by Ethan Chen[1])

I would like to propose to add "decoration-boundary" as a value of  
'text-decoration-skip'[2].

The purpose is for the reader to visually tell

<p><u>A</u><u>B</u></p>

and

<p><u>AB</u></p>

apart by leaving a very tiny space at the beginning and end of a text  
decoration.

The use cases are proper noun mark[3] and citation marks used in  
Chinese. (Picture [4]). I don't know any other use cases.

The current CSS3 Text draft pretty much leaves the length of a text  
decoration undefined, but all current implementations seem to draw  
text decorations throughout the content box, hence connecting, say,  
consecutive underlines into a single line. Notice that in the picture  
an underline is a little bit shorter than the text.

While this effect can be achieved via 'letter-spacing' and the current  
drafted interpretation[5], I think this is a bit hacky and might not  
be a good practice.

Proposed spec change:

Add
[[
decoration-boundary

Skip over a tiny space at the beginning and end of a text decoration.  
The purpose is to leave spaces between consecutive text decorations.
]]


[1] (Chinese) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-ig-zh/2010Sep/0091.html
[2] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-text/#text-decoration-skip0
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_name_mark
[4] http://www.go8.com.tw/files/4168%200004.jpg
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=299943


Cheers,
Kenny

Received on Friday, 3 December 2010 17:24:16 UTC