[css3-writing-modes] eliminate 'sideways' and 'sideways-left' for 'text-orientation'

As part of our work on supporting vertical text, we're working on adding support for the 'text-orientation' property to Gecko. 

There are only three values needed for actual vertical text usage, the default, automatic behavior, and explicit overrides for the vertical and sideways cases. I'd prefer these be 'auto, vertical, sideways' but the spec wants these to be 'mixed, vertical, sideways-right'.

I think we should simply drop the other values, 'sideways' and 'sideways-left' for this level ('glyph-orientation' is already optional). The 'sideways-right' value is the value used by authors for both Mongolian and CJK vertical text.

fantasai seemed to think there were uses for 'sideways-left' but these seem like obscure, unnecessary cases [1]. The 'sideways' keyword is a synonym for either 'sideways-right' or 'sideways-left' depending upon the writing-mode but there's no need for a value with this behavior, it's basically just an synonym for use in the CJK case. As such, it's unnecessary and clutters the property design.

For this level, I think I'd prefer it if implementations focused on values that are actually used. If use cases arise later that require it we can add them back in as needed.

Regards,

John Daggett
Mozilla Japan

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Aug/0279.html

Received on Wednesday, 10 September 2014 02:25:10 UTC