Re: [css-text] I18N-ISSUE-316: Line breaking defaults

On May 23, 2014, at 11:24 PM, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org> wrote:

> On 10/05/2014 08:32, Koji Ishii wrote:
>> That makes sense, though, we can’t do that today for web-compatibility. We’ll keep considering this in future.
> 
> Could you give some more details?

Sorry I was too terse. What implementers want to know are what to fix, rather than asking them to scrap-and-rebuild existing line breaking code. There are too many documents on the web that rely on existing behavior, I think we came too far from where scrap-and-rebuild can give better results than fixing issues.

I’m very happy to hear feedback where existing implementations do differently from UAX#14, so that we could examine each issue and decide whether or how to fix them. One example was from Kenny last year[1], where IE, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox do not honor line breaking behavior between &nbsp; and replaced elements. We fixed this by changing rule priorities of LB20 and LB11/LB12 since it was considered that the benefits of following UAX#14 for this specific issue is lower than the bad impacts by changing this behavior for existing documents. Note that this is not a WG resolution, editors thought this is the right thing to do and no objections so far (or no attentions yet ;), so please re-raise if our judge does not seem to be right.

But I hope this example makes sense to you. As we get more specific feedback and the spec level increases, we could add more to the Line Breaking Details[2] if we had real specific issues and people agrees that benefits win over the breaking changes for that issue. At the point that implementers think that their existing code have incorporated all the changes to be conformant to UAX#14, we could remove all such details and just say “follow UAX#14”, but until then, we would like to know what to fix against existing implementations.

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014May/0069.html
[2] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-text/#line-break-details

/koji

Received on Sunday, 25 May 2014 05:29:03 UTC