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

Koji Ishii wrote:

> 1. "auto", which allows UA-dependent implementation of glyph orientations.

I don't think we should not be defining property values simply to paper
over differences in implementations done before the spec is finished.
I don't see what defining "auto" achieves.

> 2. A value to force upright rendering orientation regardless of the
> code point (the one John proposed before.)

I think it would be best if you listed the wording you're proposing
for this.

> 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.

This is an EPUB issue, not a CSS issue.  If EPUB defined behavior for
this then that continues.  If they breezed over issues related to this
property and ignored a difficult problem in the interest of stamping
"done" on their spec, that's their decision.  Our goal here is to come
up with something reasonable that assures consistency across
implementations.

> 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.

There is no existing interoperable behavior here.  Simply saying
"implementations don't change" doesn't make much sense at all.  If
implementation A and B don't do the same thing, one or both of them
will need to change.

Regards,

John Daggett

Received on Wednesday, 9 May 2012 14:09:55 UTC