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

I agree that this is a styling issue and should be solved in CSS, not in HTML.

This is an interesting issue to me. If I understand this correctly, scripts that use spaces as word delimiters can distinguish the two:
  <u>word word</u>
  <u>word</u> <u>word</u>
while scripts that do not use spaces don’t have a way to do so today.

I don’t see this type of underlines very often in Japan, but I remember I saw in school text and in exams.

One thing I’m not clear is, should we add a new value for this purpose, or should we just change the default behavior to add a small space in between non-space-delimited scripts, and let test suites to make sure browsers implement correctly.

That may cause backward compatibility problem, but as long as the source semantically splits the two underlines as in:
  <u>word</u><u>word</u> where ‘word’ is an ideographic letters
I don’t see much problems if the underline splits. Rather, I see splitting reflects author’s intention better.

Another thing I wonder is, is this useful for English as well? For instance, if CSS can distinguish the two visually:
  <u>problematic</u>
  <u>problem</u><u>atic</u>
I wonder this may be useful, although its usage isn’t high.

Any opinions?


Regards,
Koji

From: public-i18n-cjk-request@w3.org [mailto:public-i18n-cjk-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Ethan Chen
Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 5:58 AM
To: Ambrose LI
Cc: John Cowan; KangHao Lu (Kenny); WWW Style; CJK discussion
Subject: Re: [css3-text] Proposal to add "text-decoration-skip: decoration-boundary"

Previously I wrote a temporary solution to the issue using CSS sibling selectors (b.pn + b.pn) [1], which would give the two elements a small space in between. In my opinion, none of the solution and inserting "&#x2009;" or "&#x200A;" is semantically correct.

In Chinese writing rules, we cannot find the use of half-width space of these kinds. Also, the tiny small separation of the punctuation (proper nouns and citation marks) can only be seen in the "decorative lines". The character-spacing is supposed to remain the same as non-formatted one. Therefore, I strongly suggest that we have "special provisions of underlines".



 1.   (Chinese) http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-ig-zh/2010Sep/0091.html





在 Dec 4, 2010 3:56 AM 時， Ambrose LI 寫到：


2010/12/3 John Cowan <cowan@mercury.ccil.org<mailto:cowan@mercury.ccil.org>>


KangHao Lu (Kenny) scripsit:

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.

This can be handled by inserting &#x2009; or &#x200A;, at least in non-gridded text.

If we go for spaces we might as well just write a CSS rule for u+u,
which I think is cleaner. It would also be more consistent, in the
sense that if we are going to use spaces between proper nouns we might
as well mark all word boundaries with spaces, but that's not the usual
way we write Chinese. (Personally I'm very disappointed that u got
deprecated as "visual formatting", since for us it is semantic markup.
But that'd be OT.)

--
cheers,
-ambrose