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

Oh, I missed this one before sending the last mail, sorry about that.

> Following up on this it seems I'm misunderstanding the problem i.e.
> we're not really standardizing what one particular engine is doing
> at the moment - good!

Wonderful to hear that, thank you.

> - but we are defining a solution so as to
> prevent some early adopters from depending on this engine. Said
> solution derives from work in progress at Unicode; moreover, some
> content creators expect that whatever content they produce that
> conforms to our draft will be stable i.e. future UTR50 implementations
> will not conflict with content.

I don't think the last part is true. The spec clearly says "we will be tracking changes."[1]

Well, "some" may be true because not everyone reads specs. Could be "many." But as I wrote in my previous mail, we could work on versioning scheme and define how to migrate old contents to new one with some transition period, if the WG agrees with it.


> If so, that still seems dangerous
> for all the same reasons. I do not think it is wise to have our
> own UTR50 fork, however temporarily that may be; *especially* if
> we know some publishers mean to treat our *draft* and the UTR50
> snapshot contained therein as a standard. This sounds confusing,
> if not misleading. I would not want us to support such an
> expectation without explicit agreement from our Unicode partners.
> And if we have such agreement then I really don't understand why
> we need our own copy...?

Here's a screenshot of e-book readers today[2] -- they're not CSS-based, but I hope you can see how orientations vary by readers. Contents today is very low in volume, but we expect tens of thousands of contents being created in the coming 6 months, and authors need something to rely on. Does this explain the need to have a snapshot?

Now, please allow me to ask questions to make sure if I understand you correctly, because this one seems to be especially important, and I can't be confident on my English skills. Sorry for bothering.

1. You may be ok if temporarily -- temporarily do you mean by the final of UTR50, correct?

2. You may be ok if we don't have to support such an expectation, or if we have explicit agreement from our Unicode partners. Correct?

3. I didn't understand what the "such an expectation" is. Did you mean if we can come up with good wordings to make sure what we have in the draft is temporarily until UTR50 becomes final, final UTR50 is very likely to have different values, and support for the current table will be deprecated in future?

4. Does "explicit agreement from our Unicode partners" mean we get explicit agreement from Eric, the editor of the UTR50, to have a snapshot in our spec?

5. Assuming 3 and 4 are correct, allow me to double-confirm; are they OR? I mean, you can live with either, or do you require both?

[1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-writing-modes/#vertical-orientations

[2] http://twitpic.com/a180ys


Regards,
Koji

Received on Friday, 29 June 2012 21:01:45 UTC