Re: [css-text-4] variants of pre-wrap and longhands of the white-space property

>> So I suggest changing to:
>>   [the UA] is not required to honor all
>>   soft wrap opportunities between or around white space.
>> 
>> That's a bit different from what I had initially, but that's to make sure
>> we allow IE to not break around the single space between a and b in the
>> example above.
> 
> No, that's too broad. Suppose your example was CJK. The UA would then be
> forced to break between CJK characters. That's clearly not what's wanted:
> the effect you're looking for here is to ignore these spaces for the purpose
> of calculating the line length for line-wrapping.
> 
> I've adjusted the wording accordingly. Let me know if that works.

Works for me. I do not share your worry that UAs would use the looser wording
as an opportunity to do silly and bad things, and I'd expect them to be smart about
which soft wrap opportunities they would ignore, but your proposal covers the known
use cases, so that's fine too.

>> 1) matching platforms conventions.
>> 
>> I said "UAs may visually collapse the advance widths of preserved white space[...]"
>> and "[...] the UA should match platform conventions"
>> 
>> You changed it to: "[...] in order to match platform conventions [...],
>> the UA <em>may</em> visually collapse [...]"
>> 
>> As I read it, your phrasing only allows collapsing the advance widths of preserve white space if it is done do match platform conventions.
>> 
>> My use of should instead of must in the second sentence was intentional.
>> As preserve-auto was meant to allow UAs to keep (under a different name)
>> the "smart" behavior that they currently have. And that behavior does
>> not systematically match platform conventions.
> 
> It should. That is the only reason we're allowing multiple behaviors here.
> Otherwise we should be converging on some sort of interoperable definition.
> I don't see a good argument for being inconsistent with platform conventions
> *and* being inconsistent with other Web browsers.

It is not clear that there are consistent platform conventions to follow, since many native editors behave differently. UAs may want to do something that provides a (subjectively) better reading/editing experience, without necessarily matching the platform behavior (e.g. match MS Word, rather than the default windows text editing component).

Also, the difference between the UA doing something smart independently, or following platform conventions is not something we can readily test.

So it seems to me that "Do something smart, should match platform conventions", is a a good way to spec this kind of automagic behaviors.

 - Florian

Received on Wednesday, 23 September 2015 05:40:01 UTC