RE: [css3-text] alternate name for line-break: newspaper

> exactly what rules would be different?

It's based on C.3 of JLREQ[1].

I was thinking 'newspaper' is pretty clear and safe, but the fact that you feel so strange indicates that there're good number of people who might feel strange.

Adding levels is a future thing, which may or may not happen. I'm fine with 'loose' hoping we're creative enough to come up with a good idea if it happens.

Allow me to check with Japanese groups and with my co-editors if they are fine too.


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/#en-app3_3

-----Original Message-----
From: Brady Duga [mailto:duga@ljug.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 3:11 AM
To: Koji Ishii
Cc: Brady Duga; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css3-text] alternate name for line-break: newspaper


On Dec 21, 2010, at 9:12 AM, Koji Ishii wrote:
> 
> The reason you think 'loose' is more appropriate than 'looser' is why we chose 'newspaper' here. The original request from Japanese publishers was 4 levels, and we tentatively named them looser, loose, normal, and strict. Within the 4 levels, the 'loose' is less important than others so we agreed to punt this to future. We're then left with looser, normal, and strict, but 'looser' without 'loose' seemed odd, exactly as you said, and therefore the name 'newspaper' came in.

The term 'newspaper' doesn't seem to work either, though. It's is not at all clear that 'newspaper' means "less restrictive then loose". Perhaps it would help to know exactly how the original 'looser' and 'loose' were different. That is, exactly what rules would be different? Perhaps a name would become obvious if I understood the practical differences. I objected to the term specifically because I did some work with a Japanese company (which in turn was working with some newspapers) to do newspaper layout using ePub and they wanted line breaks that were closer to 'normal'. For that project the physical media was different than a real newspaper, which allowed for longer lines.

> 
> 
> My personal opinion is 'newspaper' works good, as I hope people understands what it represents, rather than what it is explicitly designed for. For instance, 'portrait' represents the paper orientation even if it's not a picture.

True, though the term 'portrait' as an orientation predates CSS by a good 50 years, possibly longer. Is it the case that people who design content using CJK scripts will understand that 'newspaper' means "extremely unrestricted, even more so than something called loose"? If this is a common term used in CJK typography then I am fine with using it.

> 
> But I'm not native English speaker, if you think it's very strange, I can live with 'loose', and I can add 'semi-loose' just like we do for font-weight[1].

Well, as a native English speaker semi-loose sounds *really* weird :) It's not so much that 'newspaper' is strange from a language perspective, it just doesn't seem necessarily obvious to me what it means. But I am not a designer of CJK content, so perhaps it is irrelevant - if users will understand this, that's fine. And in reality I expect we will mainly see 'auto' used, since most typography in UAs is pretty bad anyway.

> 
> Can you please confirm, even if it's possible to add more levels between this value and 'normal' in future, do you think 'loose' is better?

I think 'loose' is better, but I am not sure it will be easy to add a new value between it and 'normal'. Though, I am not sure using 'newspaper' makes that any easier. But as I said, I doubt most users will care - this seems like something that will be used by publishers targeting specific UAs that are intended to mimic traditional print content. I am sure most of them (being typography snobs) will understand that 'newspaper' means "really bad breaks".

--Brady

Received on Tuesday, 21 December 2010 19:08:50 UTC