[css-text] How to define lang-specific justification behavior?

In Tucson F2F, the WG resolved to make justification behavior as much content language dependent as possible, but did not resolve clearly how we define the language-dependent part. Could we discuss and define it, since we’re starting to see examples, and  defining this could affect the design of text-justify?

A bit longer version of the history is that, we used to define text-justify to have behavior-oriented values. So whenever we learn a new behavior is needed for a language, we added a value.

In Tucson F2F, IIUC, the WG wanted:
1. Justification is as automatic as possible once author sets the content language.
2. Remove as much values of text-justify as possible, unless single language needs to switch between more than one behavior.

To do this, there were ideas to do something similar to counter-styles, or delegating the work to I18N WG, but we didn’t discuss in depth and didn’t resolve.

The first option is to add language specific behaviors to CSS Text, such as “do this if the content language is Korean". We don’t know how many such behaviors we will need, it may be a small number, but this has a risk for CSS Text going back to WD whenever we needed to add a language.

If we were going to go with a separate spec just like we do for counter-styles, or delegate the work to other WGs, such separate spec/notes could define mappings between languages and behaviors, but CSS Text needs to define values for necessary behaviors for the mappings, which conflicts with #2.

Which way—or the other options—do we want to take?

/koji

Received on Sunday, 3 August 2014 12:46:18 UTC