[css-inline] feedback on initial-letter

Hi Dave and Fantasai,

Nice edits on initial-letter, it's starting to look pretty good!

I've made a quick review, and here are a few comments.

1) "[TK] Reference points on the drop cap must align precisely"

What's [TK]?

2) "Note: In some cases, the exclusion area for the drop initial is larger than its glyph in order to preserve inline-axis alignment. This effect is out-of-scope for this level."

Does this mean that this level does not define how this works, but UAs are free to attempt it, or that conformant UAs must not do it?

3) The grammar of the initial-letter property says: "Value: normal | [<integer> <number>?]"
the prose after it says:
"<number>: This first argument [...]
 <integer>: This optional second argument [...]"

There's a mix up here between number and integer. Looks like the prose is right and the grammar is swapped.

4) In the initial-letter-align property definition: "auto: The user agent selects the value which corresponds to the language of the text."

Shouldn't that be the script, rather than the language? Also, in case where they differ, should this be the one of the initial letter, or of the surrounding text?

I've got some examples of "initial-letter: 2 1;" (with "text-indent: 1em hanging;") with a mix of Chinese and latin characters in a Chinese-English dictionary at home. Here's an example: http://florian.rivoal.net/csswg/cn-en_raised-cap_shed.jpg

Let me know if you want me to scan more pages.

5) Not completely sure what this means: "[...] and hanging-punctuation apply to the first line of text as normal in the presence of initial letters."

Given this:

<style>
  p { hanging-punctuation:first; }
  p::first-letter { initial-letter:2; }
</style> 
<p>"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice [...]</p>

Does the hanging quotation mark end up the same size as the C, or as the rest of the text?

6) I am wondering if we could extend initial-letter somehow to solve drop headers, as described in JLREQ: http://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/#fig3_1_5-en

You can already do it today with floats, but it requires eyeballing font metrics, which is the problem initial-letter is solving for drop caps.

http://jsbin.com/mareba/1/watch

7) "The editors would appreciate any examples of drop initials in non-western scripts"

I don't know how many examples of sunken cap you have for CJK, but in case you don't have much, here's one in Japanese.

http://florian.rivoal.net/csswg/jp-sinked-cap.jpg

I can probably dig out more, let me know if you need something specific.

 - Florian

Received on Thursday, 11 December 2014 12:55:24 UTC