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

Most people who said they were confused weren't confused with logical directions as such, just by having a hard time remembering which is which between the start/end and before/after keyword pairs. It is easier to remember that head/foot are the block direction keywords.

Had the new terminology (head/foot) been introduced in flexbox value or property names already, I would be strongly opposed to reverting to before/after. But as far as I can tell, the only references are in prose, and phrased in a neutral way, like this for example: " The main-start and main-end directions are equivalent to the before/head and after/foot directions".

Writing modes is still in my mind more amenable to change, and although I don't really enjoy renaming things all the time, I am somewhat receptive to the arguments in favor of before/after.

All in all, I can live with either solution, and I think there is still room for change, if that's what we want.

Florian

"Martin J. Dürst" <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:

>I agree with Tokushige, Glenn, and Addison.
>
>As an additional argument, based on my long work in 
>internationalization, I have always felt that while it may not be 
>hopelessly bad to have gratuitous differences for features of specs
>that 
>are widely used. But having such differences in features that are used 
>only rarely, in particular in internationalization, is really, really
>bad.
>
>Also, I would like to point everybody to http://www.w3.org/Style/,
>which 
>among other things says:
>
>"CSS and XSL use the same underlying formatting model and designers 
>therefore have access to the same formatting features in both
>languages. 
>W3C will work hard to ensure that interoperable implementations of the 
>formatting model are available."
>
>This is part of a common understanding that was gained at a time when 
>there were heavy clashes between the proponents of the two
>technologies. 
>For some background, please also see
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1999Jun/0040.html.
>
>Regards,    Martin.
>
>On 2012/09/24 10:56, koba wrote:
>>> Saying "hard to understand" is subjective, so not everyone may
>agree. If you change "speculation" to "subjective," it's more
>understandable. But when a good number of people say "hard to
>understand for me," even if it's subjective and even if it's not hard
>to understand for you, shouldn't we take them into account?
>>
>> When I first read XSL-FO spec, it was difficult to undertand
>> before/after for me too. But the difficulty was caused by
>> the concept of logical direction but not by terminology.
>>
>> You had better to analyse why people says "hard to understand".
>> IMO, a change of terminology will not make the issue easy.
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Tokushige Kobayashi

Received on Monday, 24 September 2012 08:39:27 UTC