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

Appendix C is not stable because we stopped working on it since June, when we've got strong objections on the current direction and people wanted to wait for UTR#50. Now that the first draft of UTR#50 is out, we could re-start investigating what's the in scope of the UTR#50 and what's not, and what CSS WG needs to do on our side. As fantasai said, if the goal of UTR#50 is just for future and doesn't care much on existing fonts, it'd be our responsibility to develop methods for existing environment. Those things I'm still not sure as of today, I will spend more time reading UTR#50 from now on.

I don't think EPUB and Web are two completely separate animals. People creating EPUB are also creating browser-based readers, which is part of the Web. Whatever bad things happen to them will be bad for us, and good things for them are good for us. I hope we understand that and try to make cooperation between Web and EPUB even better. I believe EPUB guys will be very happy to spend efforts to do so.


Regards,
Koji

-----Original Message-----
From: John Daggett [mailto:jdaggett@mozilla.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2011 9:20 PM
To: Koji Ishii
Cc: Eric Muller; www-style
Subject: 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 Thursday, 6 October 2011 11:32:49 UTC