Re: Text "extent" in SVG 2 vs CSS Writing Modes

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 1:24 PM, Amelia Bellamy-Royds
<amelia.bellamy.royds@gmail.com> wrote:
> In reading through the CSS Writing Modes spec [1] (which is officially at CR
> level), I discovered that it uses the word "extent" in a conflicting sense
> to how it is used in SVG 2.

The CSSWG already renamed those terms (you're reading an outdated TR
version).  We'll update the specs in the next few months.

The current terms can be found in the Editor's Draft: inline-size
(size in the inline dimension; horizontal in English) and block-size
(perpendicular to that).

> In the CSS spec, the extent of a text block is its the distance across
> multiple lines.  In SVG 2, the extent attribute would describe the maximum
> length of a single line -- something that the CSS spec calls the "measure".
>
> The minutes from the F2F that chose the word `extent` aren't terribly
> informative [2]: does anyone remember why this particular term was chosen?
> If it was intended to synchronize with the CSS terminology, then we got it
> wrong.  If its just an unfortunate coincidence, I wonder if it is not too
> late to replace it with `line-length` or something else?

SVG chose the wrong term anyway - "measure" is literally "the length
of a line of text"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_%28typography%29  ^_^

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 7 May 2015 20:33:42 UTC