Re: Follow-up on Balance Text Proposal

On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 10:54 AM, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 12:27 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 9:17 AM, Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm also concerned that this is a "yes, fix this bug" switch.  Under
>>> what circumstances would one NOT want a headline, a section heading,
>>> or indeed an entire paragraph to be wrapped such that all lines are of
>>> similar length?  Wouldn't it be better to encourage browsers to
>>> implement better algorithms *which are on by default*?
>>
>> When you have a huge page of text which wasn't intended to be
>> displayed as a web page, but nonetheless is being viewed.  Don't wanna
>> crash your browser trying to optimally balance a 10k line "paragraph"
>> of JSON.
>
> All the optimal-balancing algorithms I know about are resilient in the
> presence of a "this paragraph is too large, split it arbitrarily into
> reasonably-sized chunks" heuristic.
>
> (One of these years I'll get around to implementing Knuth-Plass
> linebreaking in Servo to see how it goes.)

I'm just parroting the reasons I've been given before; I don't
actually know details.

~TJ

Received on Sunday, 12 October 2014 21:55:41 UTC