- From: Karl Dubost <karld@opera.com>
- Date: Sun, 12 Dec 2010 09:16:12 -0500
- To: Pierre Bertet <bonjour@pierrebertet.net>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
Pierre,
> But the ::first-letter already do this, defining a "letter", wich is
> not very clear too. To clarify this, the CSS3 Selectors spec refers to
> the Unicode Standard Annex #29 [1].
> This document seems very complex to me, but it also contains a “Word
> Boundaries” section, which seems to defines exactly that.
And the document says:
This specification is a default mechanism; more
sophisticated engines can and should tailor it for
particular locales or environments. For example,
good Thai, Lao, Chinese, or Japanese word-break
boundaries require the use of dictionary lookup,
analogous to English hyphenation.
– http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-9.html
Which means you need the full dictionary of characters. I do not English hyphenation is really handled in browsers for the same reason (please, make me wrong here.).
Note that ::first-letter somehow is also misleading for asian languages such as Japanese and Chinese. Maybe it should have been ::first-char, but I guess it is too late. "::first-letter" was introduced I guess to mimic this old tradition of lettrines (Initial [1]). "Le charme suranné de l'écriture du monde physique".
"::first-chars-before-space" could work, but what would be the use case, which is the thing missing in this discussion, I think.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial
--
Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
Developer Relations & Tools, Opera Software
Received on Sunday, 12 December 2010 14:16:50 UTC