Re: breaking overflow

On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 1:49 AM, Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well that's why I suggested that it be limited to individual text nodes, not
> to text that crossed into (or were broken by) other elements. Even with that
> limitation, it would still be powerful and very useful (especially if you
> could use regular expressions).

Ah, okay.  That makes it relatively simple to deal with, then.
There's still some cases you have to handle, though - how would the
following display?

<p>foo bar baz</p>
p { color: black; }
p::text("foo") { color: red; }
p::text("foo bar") { color: blue; }
p::text("bar baz") { color: green; }

That's one simple nesting, and one non-trivial overlap.

>> Don't line breaks get normalized to spaces during the
>> whitespace-collapsing step?
>> In that case this code still wouldn't
>> work, as it'd miss those linebreaks.
>
> That sounds like like you just refuted your own argument. If a line break is
> turned into a space in the DOM, and that space is selected with the
> pseudo-element and not displayed, then what's the problem?

Whitespace isn't collapsed in the DOM, it's collapsed as a display
effect only.  (CRLFs get normalized during parsing, but that's it.)
If ::text() operates on the DOM, it will miss the linebreaks, which
will subsequently get turned into spaces for display.  To make this
work you'd need a full regexp so you can select all whitespace.

>> Something like ::text certainly has some
>> uses I can think of,
>
> I find myself often wishing for it, especially when styling HTML that I
> can't edit myself.

Indeed, I have many cases where it would be useful, where I'm
currently just adding completely meaningless spans around arbitrary
groups of text because of how I want it to display.  For example, the
heading at http://webportal.igofigure.com/webportal has four pretty
unnecessary inline elements to generate the desired effect for the
text.

>> but I'd rather solve the issue of whitespace
>> handling more directly.
>
> Well, sure, I'd like both too. But if I were to choose which I wanted more,
> it'd be the more powerful thing that fulfill do both roles if need be.

It can't fulfill both roles, though - it's not capable of duplicating
the other values for white-space-collapse.  I'd rather not decide
which one I want more - I want them all.  ^_^

~TJ

Received on Sunday, 3 January 2010 14:58:54 UTC