[css3-writing-modes] auto and upright for text-orientation

I would like to propose two additions to the text-orientation property:

1. "auto", which allows UA-dependent implementation of glyph orientations.
2. A value to force upright rendering orientation regardless of the code point (the one John proposed before.)

We have been discussing on glyph orientations for the last 11 months. During that, a couple of companies have publicly mentioned the availability of e-book readers in the 2nd half of this year; from late summer to by the end of this year. Several companies have provided evaluation versions of their e-book readers to publishers, and some early publishers have established contents creation rules based on existing implementations. A government project to produce 60,000 e-books has started. It is expected that Japanese HTML/CSS e-books will be available in the order of tens of thousands by the end of this year.

Many of them have passed the point where they can keep discussing on default glyph orientations and have no way other than doing their own. UTR#50 may be able to come to a conclusion in, say, 3 to 6 months, but it's unlikely that products shipping this year can adopt to it any longer. They think, a set of good default orientations and smart-upright is a nice feature, but the features are not important enough to slip schedules.

Given such situation, I would like to have CSS Writing Modes Level 3 accept existing implementations rather than forcing them to change after they shipped their products. The two additions I proposed above allow doing this.

I originally agreed that finding a good set of default orientations is a good thing, and I still agree with it. I appreciate the efforts and future products might benefit from UTR#50, but I consider it's not as important as to block shipping good products. I would like us to support people who have implemented and who are already using vertical flow text.

Thoughts? Opinions are greatly appreciated.


Regards,
Koji

Received on Thursday, 3 May 2012 08:18:11 UTC