Re: text-decoration-skip-ink auto should continue past behavior - 30+ years of underline behavior changed by latest CSS draft

On 28 February 2018 at 05:06, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
wrote:

> On 02/22/2018 08:48 PM, Plumb-Larrick, C. Andrew wrote:
>
>> Okay. You don't like it. So set the property the way you want it on your
>> sites or in a user stylesheet. In all your posts I haven't really seen an
>> argument on the merits about this -- just about your preference (hey,
>> that's what css directives are for!) And a sort of out-of-context
>> caricature of the argument for bias against changing defaults.
>>
>> My impression is that underlining is relatively rare in professional
>> typography outside of the Web, where best-practices generally confine its
>> usage to hyperlinks. (Otherwise, it is usually a substitute for italic,
>> originally driven by the limitations of typewriters.) So I haven't been
>> informed by the research into existing typographic practices that the
>> committee has done, and that inform their draft. But I have no reason to
>> doubt it. (I think *if* you have the germ of a good argument it would have
>> something to do with this special case of link-marking calling for
>> different behavior than normal typographic best practices.)
>>
>> Because of this relatively limited use case for underline, I'm also
>> relatively unconcerned about the outcome. On this side, noting only the
>> need for an eye toward the concern (stated by others, not you) about some
>> 'non-ink' underlines looking like two links. I think this is mostly
>> unlikely to present an issue (such breaks will usually be within one word,
>> and there are generally other link cues like hover colors, etc). But it IS
>> a very useful point and highlights something for designers to attend to in
>> the real world.
>>
>> In light of what has been stated to be the research from underline usage
>> in typography, I have no reason to doubt that the proposed default for this
>> property is the correct choice on balance -- particularly in light of the
>> vast overall improvement in browser typography support that we've seen.
>>
>
> I think a related problem is also quality-of-implementation. If the
> browser skips
> too far on either side of the descender, the resulting underline looks
> disjointed
> and is harder to distinguish as an underline; the position of the
> underline affects
> how badly the line is disrupted. Etc. There's a parallel thread about this
> on the
> blink-dev mailing list right now.
>
> The CSS specs currently leave these decisions up to the UA: it's allowed
> to skip,
> but not required, and the details of the behavior are unspecified:
>   https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-3/#line-decoration


I just read through the whole thread right now and was wondering whether
there is some data backing the change of the default underlining to skip
ink? So, being totally objective and disregarding any historical usage in
typography or opinions of single people, when you can come up with
representative numbers that indicate that the majority of people prefer
when descenders are skipped, then that's a real argument for changing the
default and can't be negated. Brad Czerniak already presented some numbers
in regard of people with dyslexia and other disabilities, so maybe there
are more.

I mean, I like this change, personally, because I find the text more
readable. Though if 80% of all people disagree, then it should probably not
be the default.

Sebastian