RE: [css3-text-layout] "design philosophy" or "basic idea" how vertical writing would work in CSS

> I personally believe that this approach is restricted to very simple documents only and
> does not provide a solid basis for introducing 
> vertical writing to CSS.   The biggest limitation is that it does not
> allow the mixture of horizontal writing and vertical writing.  Magazines or pamphlets heavily
> use such mixture.  Even simple books in vertical writing use horizontal writing for page numbers,
> running headers/footers, and captions (see
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-jlreq-20090604/#fig1_14-en) , although it is certainly possible to
> provide some ad-hoc implementations of page numbers, running headers/footers, and captions.

Maybe I mislead again here. The rotation I'm talking about only applies to the block that has the property. So you can still mix multiple directions of text flows in a page.

If you want headers in horizontal flow, you can set to the div. Or you can set default to horizontal, and set the body to vertical.


Regards,
Koji Ishii

-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given)
Sent: Saturday, June 26, 2010 10:25 PM
To: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css3-text-layout] "design philosophy" or "basic idea" how vertical writing would work in CSS

Incidentally, I started to write a discussion document named "CSS reformulation
for vertical writing".   Let me quote the introduction section.

	1. Introduction

	This document is intended to sketch vertical-writing CSS.  We
	believe that vertical writing has far-reaching impacts on CSS
	and that incorporation of a few properties is not sufficient. 
	Rather than focusing on the writing-mode and some other
	properties, this document attempts to classify all changes
	necessary, desirable, or appropriate.  Hopefully, a revised
	version of this document can be used as a guideline for
	reformulating CSS for vertical writing.

HTML5 Japanese Interest Group of W3C have had some preparatory discussions in the Japanese language.  Interested people here might want to join (but only when you understand the Japanese language ;-) I plan to send my 

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-ig-jp/2010Jun/0006.html

> You may wonder what I'm talking about. Vertical writing is not a 
>single feature as you all might have already understood. It is a 
>writing "system" used in East Asia, and it consists of multiple 
>features working together. To design such a big set of features, I hope 
>you agree that it is preferable to have a design philosophy to have 
>better common understandings.

I agree wholeheartedly here

> Since the word processors with vertical writing feature appeared in 
>the world, which was almost 30 years ago, all systems used one design 
>philosophy. That is, to rotate horizontal writing system clockwise by 
>90 degree, and make it the "reference platform".

First, let us make sure what you mean by "rotate horizontal writing system clockwise by 90 degree".  Internally, everything is horizontal writing.  When you display or print documents, the system behaves as if it first constructs an image and then rotates it by 90 degree.  

For example, suppose that you system internally creates a page layout as
below:

    a b c 
    d e f

By rotating the page layout, we get a page layout such as:

                 d a
                 e b
                 f c

Of course, for this approach to work, you need fonts rotated the other way around.  The biggest advantage of this approach is its simplicity.

I personally believe that this approach is restricted to very simple documents only and does not provide a solid basis for introducing 
vertical writing to CSS.   The biggest limitation is that it does not
allow the mixture of horizontal writing and vertical writing.  Magazines or pamphlets heavily use such mixture.  Even simple books in vertical writing use horizontal writing for page numbers, running headers/footers, and captions (see
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-jlreq-20090604/#fig1_14-en) , although it is certainly possible to provide some ad-hoc implementations of page numbers, running headers/footers, and captions.


Cheers,
Makoto

Received on Monday, 28 June 2010 08:55:02 UTC