Re: [css3-text] Splitting CSS Text into Level 3 and Level 4

On Thu, 01 Dec 2011 14:31:31 +0100, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>  
wrote:

> fantasai wrote:
>
>> === Keep in Level 3 ===
>>
>> These features are both already-implemented and required for EPUB:
>>
>>    * text-transform
>>
>> === Defer to next level ===
>>
>>    * text-replace / @text-transform
>
> There's an issue that's been brought up a couple times, most recently
> at the TPAC F2F, about whether the right approach for transforms like
> 'full-size-kana' is to add a new value, given that the use case is
> fairly small.  Rather than adding more values for uncommon use cases
> like 'full-size-kana', I think we should instead support a simple
> mechanism like @text-transform that allows authors to specify
> arbitrary transforms for use cases like this.  This allows authors to
> define a transform that fits their needs without the need for the CSS
> WG to define new values for small use case situations.
>
> If we can't resolve this before the next WD of CSS3 Text, I'd at least
> like the issue marked in the spec, wherever 'full-size-kana' is defined.

I've made a little draft of what the proposed @text-transform could look  
like,
and how it would be used to solve the use cases we've discussed so far:

http://wiki.csswg.org/ideas:at-text-transform

This is a first try, so I am sure that a lot of things can be tweaked, but
I think that this illustrates that a generic mechanism:

1) wouldn't be very hard to spec
2) wouldn't be very hard to use
3) could be used by authors to solve many more use cases that
    the ones th WG has identified and understands well

I think we should here do something similar to what we're going with  
counter styles:
Collect a number of use cases, and use them to refine the generic  
mechanism, then
make the generic mechanism normative, and keep the use cases and  
associated research
published somewhere, on the side.

Yes, this is a little more work than just defining full-size-kana. But it  
still isn't
a very large feature, and it is orders of magnitude more useful than  
full-size-kana
alone.

If there is a sense of urgency about solving the full-size-kana use case  
quickly, let's use
this momentum to get this @text-transform thing done quickly.

  - Florian

Received on Friday, 2 December 2011 14:49:53 UTC