[css-shapes] Re: Agenda conf call 02-oct-2013

Daniel Glazman wrote:

 > 3. Shapes LC
 > ------------
 > publish ?

As a WD, fine. As Last Call, no. I've expressed my views in comments
here:

  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Sep/0321.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Sep/0335.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Sep/0342.html
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Dec/0482.html

The comments have had zero impact, it seems.

I believe the curently drafted solution breaks several fundamental
CSS principles. Here's a short summary:

  - the syntax is author-unfriendly -- at least if the author is a
    human being and not an authoring tool

  - the shape describes something which may or may not appear: the
    downloadable font may or may not be available, bandwidth
    constraints may have turned font downloading off, and the user may
    have set preferences that result in altered font sizes. Describing
    the outline of a certain glyph and using this outline to run text
    around may therefore result in meaningless designs

  - style sheets will be content- and glyph-specific with little
    chance for reuse

  - there may be security problems with having glyph-specific style
    sheets

  - referring to the alpha channel of another image rather than the
    image itself seems unnecessarily complex

I believe there are much simpler and author-friedly ways to achieve the
same results, as discussed here:

  http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-page-floats/#exclusions-based-on-images

I suggest that the CSS WG issue a call for comments to the web
authoring community about how to best achieve such effects in the best
possible way.

Cheers,

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Wednesday, 2 October 2013 11:17:23 UTC