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

It's saying "line-break: loose", not "line: loose", so I'm not sure how many East Asians, the users of this property, would think the way you worried about.

"lax" is also fine with me, but I wonder if others would agree with it, as some didn't like "relaxed" either.

Probably what's missing here is the original root of the name of "line-break"; in East Asian, its direct translation is more like "prohibit line breaking rules". As you might know, line breaks can occur anywhere between two ideographic characters by default, but we have a set of rules where line breaks are prohibited. East Asians would just remember the line-break property is the property to control "prohibit line breaking rules", so "loose" makes a good sense to me.

Yet another proposal to solve your trouble: how about renaming the property name to "prohibit-line-break" or "prohibit-break"? I hope "loose" would make sense then, wouldn't it?

I'm a little worried that this may cause a little more work to browser vendors who have already implemented some of the values, but I think it's still better than not being able to reach to consensus.


Regards,
Koji

-----Original Message-----
From: John Hudson [mailto:tiro@tiro.com] 
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2010 4:32 PM
To: Koji Ishii
Cc: Christoph Päper; www-style list
Subject: Re: [css3-text] alternate name for line-break: newspaper

Koji Ishii wrote:

> I saw some arguments not liking "loose", but from the discussion, I can't find any good candidates to replace it where all can agree upon. Is it strong enough to continue looking for more candidates?

The trouble with loose is this:

Linebreaking is related to justification, which affects inter-word spacing. The purpose of what you are considering 'loose' linebreaking is relaxation of hyphenation rules in order to *avoid* loose word spacing, e.g. as occurs in narrow columns. So for anyone thinking about the text block as a whole, terms like 'loose' may be confusing because this is a term more commonly encountered in reference to spacing.

How about 'lax', as a good antonym for strict?

JH

Received on Friday, 31 December 2010 08:58:34 UTC