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

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 1:05 AM, "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.

Note that this understanding was produced over a decade ago, during a
time, as you say, when there were heavy clashes between the two techs.
 That time is long past; CSS clearly and decisively won on the web,
and XSL-FO is being shuttered as a W3C technology, with us absorbing
Liam for his expertise in printing tech (which XSL-FO was always
somewhat better at) so we can bring CSS up to rough feature parity.

XSL-FO is effectively a dead technology, one which we shouldn't worry
about when thinking about naming.


On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 4:48 AM, Alex Danilo <alex@abbra.com> wrote:
> before/after clash with ::before/::after which is unfortunate. But aliasing
> just creates further mess where the same names have different meaning
> depending on context.

There's no aliasing in CSS.  CSS has never used the names before/after
as a logical direction in any part of the language; it has only
existed in spec prose to explain things.

> I just went to the paint shop and the guy there suggested 'pre/post' as
> suitable terms for aliasing. pre -> before; post -> after kind of like in postscript.;-)

IIRC, that pair was presented as an option when we were discussing
this as well.  We decided we liked head/foot better as a group. ^_^

~TJ