Re: Inline elements should be affected by 2D Transforms

On Jun 3, 2011, at 6:56 PM, Shane Stephens wrote:

> 1. The desired behavior is very dependent upon your application.   If you want to rotate an entire paragraph, then it's inappropriate to transform line-by-line.  

An entire paragraph is already a block, so that isn't really relevant to the discussion about transforming inline spans.

> On the other hand, for blocks of text that reflow across region or page boundaries, transforming line-by-line is the only sensible approach.

This is mostly true, I believe.

> Clearly authors need to be able to describe a block of text that flows in the correct manner but that is kept together.  This, of course, is one of the purposes of inline-block.

But we are really talking about how to transform a span of inline text that is not restricted to a single box. Using inline-block doesn't cut it if you have text that might need to wrap to a second line or more, such as in a link (anchor).

> Hence restricting transforms to situations in which author intent is clear (e.g. when they have explicitly marked text as a single unit by placing it in a display:inline-block span) is very sensible.

I disagree. Such a restriction is not reasonable. Just because something is not easy or obvious to spec at first glance does not mean it is not worthwhile.

> 2. It is true that some artifacts are introduced when using inline-block on single characters.  These artifacts are:
>   a. space characters are collapsed when isolated in a span
>   b. word boundaries are not respected when words are split across multiple spans with different display settings.
> It is possible that one or both of these could be considered bugs - I don't know enough of the specifics of word boundary detection to be sure. Nevertheless it is completely possible to work around these issues, e.g. for the purpose of slightly transforming individual characters in a word.

There are other sometimes unwanted side-effects of using inline-block instead of inline, but the show stopper is that it doesn't let the element wrap to multiple lines of its parent in the same way, when it is in a flow of text and/or other inlines. I think that is a very important feature, and transforming inlines as inlines still feels pretty doable to me.

Received on Saturday, 4 June 2011 06:23:00 UTC