Re: [css3-writing-modes] before/after terminology alternative?

On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 1:57 PM, Phillips, Addison <addison@lab126.com> wrote:
> The problem here, for me, is that "head"/"foot" are more typical of the second category, while "before"/"after" are of the former. We *want* people to use logical identifiers whenever possible and to use identifiers that remind them that the direction, writing mode, or other changes may cause the interpretation of their style to change accordingly. Start/end and before/after *are* harder to understand for people who are making the assumption that the origin point of their page is always the upper left corner and that layout always proceeds in an horizontal-lr mode. But they are only just harder enough to understand that they remind folks that they are making an assumption (perhaps only exceedingly rarely violated in their lives) that may be incorrect. A small learning bump is definitely required to know what before/after mean in this context.

The argument for head/foot is that they map to "header" and "footer",
which are more clearly related to the text's logical direction.

The argument against before/after is that CSS already has the ::before
and ::after pseudo-elements, which are *completely* different.  (And
if you had to say which of the logical keywords they were more like,
it's start/end.)

These two, combined, are why we decided to switch over.

~TJ

Received on Sunday, 23 September 2012 21:04:45 UTC