Re: [css-writing-modes] Propose writing-mode: sideways-left

Comments below:

On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 10:04 AM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:

> [snip]
> Both of these proposals seem like extremely poor property design to me.
> Putting text-orientation values into the 'writing-mode' property will be
> totally confusing for authors, both those working with vertical captions in
> non-CJK text and for those working with non-CJK vertical scripts.
>
> I think we should keep the 'writing-mode' and 'text-orientation'
> properties simple and orthogonal and not try and turn 'writing-mode' into
> some form of pseudo-shorthand.
>
> Implementations will eventually implement 'sideways-left' for vertical
> caption use. Just because they haven't done so yet is not really a good
> justification for moving 'sideways-left' into 'writing-mode'.
>

It was my bad to explain my concern poorly, sorry about that.

The implementation complexity is only part of the concern, but it's more
about confusion for authors.

Both sides saying the other is confusing authors, so I suppose it's how one
would view it, but as I talk to more authors on vertical flow in CJK and
non-CJK, I found I'm not alone to think the current spec is confusing.

In my conceptual model for clock-wise rotation:
 * writing-mode rotates the block, common characters rotate too for non-CJK.
 * text-orientation additionally rotates some non-common characters for
non-CJK.
But to rotate counter-clock-wise:
 * writing-mode rotates clock-wise, and
 * use text-orientation to rotate the result by 180 degree.
I think this inconsistency confuses authors.

When authors want to change how characters/lines flow, using the
writing-mode property looks more consistent to me. On the other hand,
letting text-orientation to rotate baseline only for sideways-left is the
pseudo-shorthand from my view.

I'm not sure how to resolve this, when both sides think one is consistent
for the exactly the same reasons, and the views are different, but is my
view, though probably not agreeable for you, at least understandable?

/koji