Re: [css-text-4] Option for 'true' alignment with text-align

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 7:03 AM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
> http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-align/#overflow-values describes the
> concepts of 'safe' and 'true' alignment.
>
> The 'text-align' property defaults to 'safe' alignment.  I think it
> would be useful to add an option for 'true' alignment.
> Syntactically, I think this could be done by adding an optional
> 'true' keyword that could come before or after the current value
> space of the 'text-align' property.  I think this would be a useful
> addition to css-text-4.

I don't see anything wrong with it, certainly.

> The use case I heard was that it would be particularly useful when
> combined with 'text-overflow: ellipsis', when showing data where the
> end is more important than the start.  For example, a constrained
> space showing a phone number, where the end of the number might be
> considered more important to show than the start, could be aligned
> as 'text-align: true right; text-overflow: ellipsis' so that any
> overflowing phone numbers would have the start of the number
> overflowing (e.g., "0016177616200" being shown as "...7616200").

This use-case is fine, but its related family of "show an ellipsis at
a particular part of the visible area" isn't addressed by it, and
would need to specially handled anyway.  That is, the common request
of "show an ellipsis in the middle, with the start and end displayed"
needs a specialized control anyway. I wouldn't want to sell the
true/safe ability based on this use-case.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 23 October 2013 13:50:33 UTC