Re: Proposal: Minor 'text-transform' property revision

On 19/2/14 21:02, L. David Baron wrote:
> On Wednesday 2014-02-19 13:27 -0500, Brian Blakely wrote:
>> I recommend leaving the actual blacklist creation to user agents.
>
> No -- building the blacklist is a lot of work, and authors will
> complain if user agents don't match.  So the work should be done
> only once (in the standards process) rather than multiple times (by
> different user-agents) both to save on effort and to improve
> interoperability.

Such a blacklist is necessarily language- (or locale-) specific -- 
leaving aside the issue of different conventions that may exist even 
within a single language.

I don't think it's practical for the standards process to come up with 
appropriate blacklists for all the world's 7000-odd languages; but 
neither should UAs be constrained to supporting such a feature -only- 
for a small, ad hoc collection of "major" languages for which we define 
lists, leaving the rest as second-class citizens.

(This is a lot like hyphenation, in that it's highly language-specific 
behavior; we cannot hope to specify it correctly for all the languages 
that might be wanted, but neither should we prohibit UAs from supporting 
whatever languages they choose.)

Some possible options:

(a) No title-casing blacklists; specify explicitly that the transform 
applies to all words. Authors who want better control need to use other 
mechanisms.

(b) UAs are allowed to implement language-specific variations in 
behavior; there could perhaps be a registry somewhere of recommended 
blacklists for various languages, but this must be regarded as an 
advisory (and evolving) resource, not a clear "standard". This allows 
UAs to seek to serve the target markets/populations they care about, but 
of course it carries the risk of interop problems; again, authors who 
care about precise control should not rely on text-transform.

(c) Create a new property such as
   text-transform-titlecase-exceptions: "a" "an" "the";
that authors can use to control the behavior. This could be used 
together with :lang(...) to provide language-appropriate behavior even 
in multilingual pages -- and the UA's default stylesheet could use it to 
provide some predefined (but customizable) behavior.

JK

Received on Wednesday, 19 February 2014 21:39:42 UTC