Re: [css-text] New transform

> On Apr 1, 2016, at 22:38, Jonathan Kew <jfkthame@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 1/4/16 09:03, Henrik Andersson wrote:
>> The text-transform property is nice for the various effects that it can
>> do. However, I think that it could do more.
>> 
>> As such I propose a new value for the property.
>> 
>> The new value is rot13. When this new transform is applied the
>> characters in the text will be replaced according to the rot13
>> substitution cipher.
>> 
>> Here is an example of it being used:
>> 
>> <style>
>> .spoiler {
>>     text-transform: rot13;
>> }
>> .spoiler:hover {
>>     text-transform: none;
>> }
>> </style>
>> <div class="spoiler">Today is an important day.</div>
>> 
>> 
> 
> I don't think I support this -- it's much too limited in scope, being essentially an English-only feature. (What will rot13 do with Latin-script text that includes lots of diacritics? Let alone non-Latin alphabets?)
> 
> If -- and it's a fairly big "if", in my mind -- we want new text-transform capabilities, I think we should instead consider a more generalized feature that allows authors to specify the desired transform or substitution.

I agree. There are lots of potentially useful text transforms people can think of, but many of them are either gimmicky, or serious but targeting niche use cases. A generic mechanism for author defined transforms would be a better use of WG and UA vendor time.

> At a simple level, maybe a function modeled on the "tr" utility, which allows rot13 to be pretty trivially specified, but also allows alternative transforms, and could handle extended alphabets, etc:
> 
>  .spoiler {
>    text-transform: tr("a-zA-Z", "n-za-mN-ZA-M");
>  }
> 
> Or for a less cryptic (and more extensible) approach,
> 
>  @text-transform rot13 {
>    match: "a"-"z" "A"-"Z"; /* could also support U+XXXX notation? */
>    replace: "n"-"z" "a"-"m" "N"-"Z" "A"-"M";
>    /* could also think about other kinds of transform... reverse?
>       arbitrary text-munging functions? etc. */
>  }
> 
>  .spoiler {
>    text-transform: rot13;
>  }

I've looked into an @rule based approach a few years ago with some depth:
https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/at-text-transform

I've added the rot13 example at the bottom.

I'm happy to reopen this topic if people are interested, as I think it's a neat idea, but it wasn't obvious then that this would gather implementor interest. If people are going to be interested in this for more than a day, I'll happily resurrect this.

 - Florian

Received on Friday, 1 April 2016 14:09:47 UTC