[css3-text] Hyphenation Resources

The current CSS3 Text spec defines a 'hyphenation-resource' @-rule:

  http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-text/#hyphenation-resource

This was based on a similar property defined in CSS3 GCPM:

  http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/#the-hyphenate-resource-property

However, neither of these reference or define a syntax for the
hyphenation resource. Effectively, these are UA-specific
resources when defined this way.  As such, I don't see any reason
for supporting either the @-rule or the property in the current
form; they're both effectively vendor-specific properties with
*no* interoperability between user agents.  I think the format
should be defined/referenced explicitly or it should be removed
from the spec and left to a vendor-specific property.

For example, Antenna House uses this syntax:

  http://www.antennahouse.com/product/ahf50/hyp_dictionary.htm

Would this be a suitable format to require?  Or is there another
publicly available format that would also suffice?  Maybe
something from TeX would work?  What does Prince use?

I think one argument will be that CSS doesn't specify formats for
other types of resources such as images.  But in the case of
images there were already well-supported image types, so it
wasn't really necessary to specify these to achieve some form of
interoperability.  The same is not true for hyphenation
dictionaries.

Regards,

John Daggett

Received on Tuesday, 1 February 2011 07:16:11 UTC