[css3-lists] Proposal for additional list-style-type value and related property

Greetings All,

I am new to this list so please forgive any protocol faux pas. I did  
examine the W3C site and the archive of this list for guidance on  
prosing new CSS features and historical context, to see if something  
like the following proposal had already be suggested; as well as  
attempted to determine whether there is another way to use CSS to  
achieve the same end result. As none of these investigation turned up  
much, I am hereby posting my proposal to this list.

I would like to propose the addition of a value to list-style-type  
property and an additional supporting property.

As an additional (non-repeating) list-style-type value I propose  
"values" to be supported by the further addition of the property "list- 
style-values".

The list-style-values property summery would be something like this:

'list-style-values'
     Value:  	[[<unicode-character><unicode-character>?<diacritical- 
mark>*] | <unicode-character-range>][, [<unicode-character><unicode- 
character>?<diacritical-mark>*] | <unicode-character-range>]  | none |  
inherit
     Initial:  	none
     Applies to:  	elements with 'display: list-item'
     Inherited:  	yes
     Percentages:  	N/A
     Media:  	visual
     Computed value:  	as specified

<unicode-character> values belonging to following general unicode  
categories or codepoints should be ignored: Cc (Other, control  
characters), Co (Other, Private use characters), Cn (Other, not  
assigned characters) or if the character is of category Cf (Other,  
format characters) and is or in the range of (inclusive): 00AD,  
200B-206F, FEFF, FFF9-FFFB, E0000–E007F.

<unicode-character-range> is two <unicode-character>s sperated by a  
hyphen-minus, U+002D; e.g. \0041-\005A.

<diacritical-marks> are those unicode charaters with a category  
property of Mn, Mc, or Me.

If a list-style-values property does not exist for an element(s) for  
which the 'list-style-type: values' rule applies then the 'list-style- 
type: value' rule is ignored.

Rationale: The current version of CSS (2.1) offers very limited  
choices in terms of customization of ordered lists. Designers' should  
be allowed the freedom to style their ordered lists without having to  
rely on inelegant scripting or server-side solutions. While the CSS 3  
list module draft makes an effort to address this, the provided  
options are limited to more-or-less the expansion/internationalization  
of the usual paradigms. The above proposed additions allow much more  
freedom without individual designers having to propose particular new  
named list-style-types, so a designer could use the circled ideographs  
1-10 (U+3280 through U+3289), or counting rod numberals (U+1D360  
through U+1D371), or Yi Radicals (U+A490 through U+A4C6) as ordered  
list markers, if they wished without the burden of proposal review and  
the implementation wait.

Optionally this property could be amended to repeat with a 'repeat'  
keyword, like so:

'list-style-values'
     Value:  <repeat>? 	[[<unicode-character><unicode-character>? 
<diacritical-mark>*] | <unicode-character-range>][, [<unicode- 
character><unicode-character>?<diacritical-mark>*] | <unicode- 
character-range>]  | none | inherit
     ...

This might be useful if one wished to use playing card suits (e.g. U 
+2660, U+2663, U+2665, U+2666) in a particular order repeatedly.

Comments, questions, proposed amendments welcome.

Best,

Daniel

Received on Thursday, 16 December 2010 22:03:24 UTC