Re: [css3-writing-modes] The original issues of font-dependent glyph orientation

Koji Ishii wrote:

> I’m kind of mixed feelings about this. It’s really great to have a
> spec like UTR 50, and your idea seems to be great. I’m honored to be
> in the loop of such a great discussion. On the other hand, John
> Daggett said it’s going to finish within a few months, but given its
> impact and given feedback from typographers tend to take long, I’m
> worried CSS takes really long to reach stable state. Since EPUB is
> shipping, if CSS takes long to be stable, contents and
> implementations without interoperability can spread out very fast.
> It’s actually starting, people just take the current WebKit and says
> it’s EPUB3 compatible. Web-based ebook readers appearing supporting
> only WebKit. In that sense, I wish CSS Writing Modes Level 3 takes
> quick and less impact spec, and do the ground-breaking job in Level 4. 

I don't see an initial cut of this work taking months to resolve.  And
the other options are equally untenable, the existing definition of
default orientation in Appendix C is no more stable or consistent with
existing implementations than the proposed Unicode property.   We
don't need to resolve this to perfection, we just need to resolve it
to something reasonable.

As for what people assume is EPUB3, that's not really a CSS matter.
The EPUB folks based their spec on W3C *working drafts*, even though
W3C guidelines expressly say those should not be considered stable. 
Lack of interoperability is somewhat inevitable.

Regards,

John Daggett

Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2011 12:20:32 UTC