- From: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>
- Date: Sun, 13 Jun 2010 21:06:30 -0700 (PDT)
- To: Ishii Koji <kojiishi@gluesoft.co.jp>
- Cc: "MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)" <eb2m-mrt@asahi-net.or.jp>, www-style@w3.org, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
Koji Ishii wrote: > I'm not trying to convince you to change your mind. I just want to > clearly understand the current situation. I also wish you to > understand what issues we have right now, how Asian cultures differ > from yours, and hopefully wish you to come up with a good solution > everyone can live together. > > You know, I heard there's a culture in the world where nodding means > "no" rather than "yes". We can't force them to change their culture. > They can't change ours. There's no single answer which is right. Both > parties should just agree upon there's a cultural difference here, and > then we can communicate to each other, right? I think you're confusing cultural differences in text display with a more subtle requirement to support *both* vertical and horizontal writing modes without using separate styles for horizontal and vertial text display. The discussion here has centered around that requirement. Without that requirement, the difference between physical and logical dimensions is less meaningful I think. Left is left, in Norway, Lebanon or Japan, logical dimensions don't provide any inherent advantage to someone who is laying out elements on a page in a single preferred direction or in a mixture of vertical and horizontal elements. Beyond the discussion of physical vs. logical dimensions, CSS has historically been used to style HTML content, so fully supporting vertical text layout means thinking through the impact on all of HTML, not just a simple subset of it. Looking over XSL 1.1, I'm wondering why that wouldn't be a better basis for an EPUB standard. It already has the physical/logical model distinction and defines various writing-mode features. It's also not burdened with being the default styling language for all of HTML. Given that the EPUB standard is essentially picking a subset of pieces from other standards, it can define a subset of elements and style properties that fully support flipping between vertical and horizontal text modes while minimizing the impact of these features on EPUB implementations. Regards, John Daggett
Received on Monday, 14 June 2010 04:07:03 UTC