Re: [css-text] text-transform: capitalize Word Boundaries too strict

On 10/11/15 21:40, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 10:28 AM, Jonathan Kew <jfkthame@gmail.com
> <mailto:jfkthame@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On the other hand, if you capitalize text with things like
>     "left/right, forward/back", Gecko gives you "Left/right,
>     Forward/back", which doesn't look as good as the Webkit result
>     "Left/Right, Forward/Back".
>
>     Basically, you can't win -- there's no simple, correct answer
>     without sophisticated (language- and context-specific) analysis of
>     the content that would be way out of scope for CSS.
>
>
> Note that --- as I'm sure you know :-) --- Gecko capitalizes exactly at
> after line-break opportunities,

That doesn't seem to be strictly accurate. For example, it doesn't 
capitalize after an explicit hyphen in the text, although that is 
definitely a line-break opportunity.

> so you can at least work around cases of
> insufficient capitalization, e.g. by inserting a <wbr> before 'right'.
> Which is probably a good idea anyway.

Yes, if you control the content. But if you control the content, you'd 
do better to avoid relying on the vagaries of text-transform:capitalize 
at all, and instead make sure you explicitly capitalize things exactly 
as desired.

IMO, the main use-case for text-transform:capitalize would be when 
external content with "uncontrolled" casing is being pulled in -- e.g. 
headlines, captions, etc. from a variety of data sources -- and you want 
to give it all a reasonably uniform-looking, title-like appearance but 
don't want ALL UPPERCASE and can't afford the resources to apply 
copy-editing by a human (or a high-end natural-language processing system).

JK

Received on Tuesday, 10 November 2015 22:18:30 UTC