- From: Alan Stearns <stearns@adobe.com>
- Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 15:49:21 -0800
- To: Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com>, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- CC: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>, "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>
On 2/1/12 3:34 PM, "Brad Kemper" <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote: > On Feb 1, 2012, at 7:30 AM, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote: > >> On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 2:01 AM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> >> wrote: >>> My thinking was that if I had >>> >>> em<em>phatic</em>ally >>> >>> and I specified some letter-spacing, would I really expect to get >>> >>> em p h a t i c ally >>> >>> ? It seemed to me it made more sense for only the characters inside the >>> <em> to be spaced apart from each other, and certainly not to have a >>> half-space between some letter pairs and a full space between others. >> >> Actually, I think I'd expect that. I wouldn't expect something like >> >> emp h a t i cally, because the p and c in that just look normal. >> >> I've no idea whether I'd prefer a full space or half space on the >> ends, but some sort of additional spacing seems good. > > InDesign let's you select some letters in the middle of a word and apply > tracking (letter-spacing), and when you do it is only applied between those > letters, not at the boundaries. So it is more like what fantasai had specced. > Also, if you add tracking to a whole block of text, it does not add space to > the very beginning of the first line, nor to the ends of each line. I think > that is for the best. One can always add padding or padding to the ends to get > the other effect. It would be more annoying to try to remove it via the right > amount of negative margin. It looks to me like letter-spacing and spacing-for-emphasis are really two different things. Letter spacing when *not* done for emphasis should only work within the element boundary. As Brad notes, people who use letter-spacing in English might be surprised and annoyed if it operated outside the element where it was applied. But when spacing is used for emphasis there are a set of rules that Christoph outlined that should apply (and perhaps the rule set is language- or script-specific?). If spacing-for-emphasis is something CSS should do, I think it should be a separate property. Thanks, Alan
Received on Wednesday, 1 February 2012 23:49:52 UTC