Re: [css-text] New transform

On 1/4/16 15:09, Florian Rivoal wrote:
>
>> 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.

Personally, I'm suspicious the original suggestion wasn't intended to 
last more than a day in the first place..... ;)

JK

Received on Friday, 1 April 2016 15:15:03 UTC