Re: [css3-text] Feature request: "white-space: ignore"

On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 11:56 AM, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 2:31 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Jon Ronnenberg
>> <jon.ronnenberg@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> MY PITCH
>>> While Flexbox[5] is a wonderful thing, it isn't backwards compatible and
>>> implementing a shim has proven very difficult[12]. In contrast a small
>>> amendment to CSS3 Text module, namely "white-space: none;", is easy to shim
>>> and fixes a lot of issues that web developers are facing today.
>>
>> Once again, you can't fix "X isn't supported" by proposing a new
>> unsupported feature.  That just produces a new, larger "X and Y aren't
>> supported" problem.
>
> I think you're missing his point. He's arguing on the basis that Y is
> much smaller than X, at least arguably a desirable feature even when X
> is available, and, critically, _easy to polyfill_, which X is
> decidedly not.  Thus, if Y is added to the spec even just in an ED,
> people can start using it _right now_, which they cannot do with X.
>
> I think you also grossly underestimate the amount of time before
> Flexbox will be universal enough that people can rely on it.  The CR
> was in September 2012, so given the typical lifespan of old versions
> of IE, the difficulty of polyfilling Flexbox, and the difficulty of
> writing a stylesheet that gracefully degrades in the absence of
> Flexbox, you should assume no sooner than 2017.

* Old IEs doom every effort, no matter how small.
* When polyfilling a tiny aspect like this, using the actual syntax of
the full feature is merely a nicety, not a necessity.  You've got all
of JS at your command, it's trivial to invent your own thing and then
use Flexbox if it exists, or do it manually if it doesn't.

~TJ

Received on Saturday, 20 April 2013 19:22:55 UTC