Re: [css3-text-layout] New editor's draft - margin-before/after/start/end etc.

Iishi-san,

> I'm mixing the two because vertical text flow system has a problem
> with current CSS, and I think it is caused by the cultural
> difference which is not defined well yet in CSS.

I don't think this is a cultural difference, I think that vertical
text layout is simply not covered by the current CSS standard.  Can
this be fixed?  Sure.  

One place to start would be to do as you suggest, to swizzle around
the mappings of left, top, right, bottom based on the flow of the
text. This is what the existing vertical text implementation in IE
does.  But as fantasai and others have described, this leads to logical
inconsistencies in the style language.  Those inconsistencies are a
*CSS* problem, not a cultural one.

> I know it might look very strange to you. I know you might see we
> are wrong. I know you might think why don't we change and follow the
> way you think. That is exactly the nature of a cultural difference.
> US Dollar or Euro may be superior than Japanese Yen, but one can't
> change it in a day. This is easy to understand because everyone
> knows there're multiple currencies in the world, and Japanese Yen is
> yet another one. What we're discussing here is probably the first
> difference, which is very hard to understand and accept. If the
> world has only one currency, and if you found a new one, it's
> probably very hard to understand as in the "nodding means no"
> culture. I've been in the typography localization business for more
> than 20 years, so I can understand this might be very difficult to
> understand for you.

You're completely right, in trying to define how CSS should support
vertical text layout misunderstandings are likely to occur.  Cultural
differences will dictate the set of problems to be solved.  But
supporting vertical text in CSS means understanding completely the
impact of proposed solutions, both on other parts of CSS, including
CSS3 modules, and on HTML.  That is a technical discussion for the
most part, cultural distinctions play less of a role.

Regards,

John Daggett

Received on Monday, 14 June 2010 06:39:31 UTC