Re: [css-align] Confusing Positional alignment values 'left' / 'right'

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 5:17 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 1:59 AM, Julien Chaffraix <jchaffraix@google.com> wrote:
>> It was pointed out to me that 'left' / 'right' [1] in the Box
>> Alignment specification are not the physical directions but refer to
>> the line-relative ones, resp. line-left / line-right. AFAICT these are
>> new values in CSS Box Alignment, thus they could use the line-relative
>> values from writing-mode [2] to prevent this confusion. Did I miss
>> anything?
>
> Is there a good reason to use "line-left/right" over "left/right"?  We
> use left/right to refer to line-relative directions all over the
> place, such as in text-align; we only differentiate the terms in specs
> when necessary.

The writing mode specification makes a note about this inconsistent
use of left / right on several properties, including 'text-align' [1].

The CSS properties left / right are physical and the writing mode
specification seems to make a similar statement about the left / right
values by adding a more precise vocabulary (line-left/line-right) as
well as singling out some older, un-precise uses. Having 2
incompatible meanings for left/right is confusing and it would be an
opportunity to clarify that.

Julien

[1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-writing-modes-3/#line-mappings

Received on Thursday, 15 January 2015 16:48:29 UTC