Re: [css3-writing-modes] vertical orientation and UTR50

On Fri, 29 Jun 2012 20:50:46 +0200, Sylvain Galineau
<sylvaing@microsoft.com> wrote:

>
> [Koji Ishii:]
>>
>> Can I ask then what authors should do today? The question we were given  
>> at
>> Hamburg was, do we want them to create tens of thousands of HTML/CSS  
>> files
>> based on WebKit's implementation, or do we want to publish our own  
>> table.
>
> I don't understand this argument at all. Because some early adopters
> have no qualms about taking a hard WebKit dependency we should align with
> this implementation even though it already diverges from where Unicode
> is going ?

The proposal is not to align with Webkit's implementation. My
understanding is that Webkit's current behavior is considered horrendous,
and speccing in an approximation of what UTR50 will become is an attempt
at steering them away from madness.

By getting them to something relatively close to what the final version of
UTF50 will be, there will not be too much breakage when we switch to the
final version, unlike what would happen if we let them use a completely
different beast.

I kind of agree with the idea, but it seems to be that what needs
to target a snapshot of UTR50 is the webkit implementation much
more than the spec. If putting it in the spec would help webkit
get there, then I am in favor of doing that.

On the other hand, I am not entirely sure why it helps. If the
webkit implementors don't care, and then it doesn't matter what
we do. If they do care about matching what we plan to do, a
resolution saying "we will use UTR50 when ready, until then
implementations are encouraged do try and stay close to the
behavior advocated in UTR50's current drafts" should be enough.

Or do we expect that authors will code to the spec, and complain
about webkit working differently, forcing it to change, rather than
code to the currently available behavior?

> If some ebook publishers want to depend on WebKit's implementation,
> they're welcome to. If that turns out to be incompatible in the future  
> then
> they'll need to deal with the legacy they chose to create. Such is life.

The demand for vertical text seems stronger in ebooks than in the general
web, so the risk is that if we don't act early to guide the early ebooks
implementation towards a behavior we consider sane, they may depend on
an unspecified vendor specific behavior in the long run because they
started with that, putting pressure on that vendor not to change its
behavior, and on others to reverse engineer it.

  - Florian

Received on Monday, 2 July 2012 08:24:33 UTC