Comments on CSS3: Text LC

<http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-css3-text-20021024>

2. Introduction

The legend for cell glyphs looks odd, a <dl/> would be appropriate IMO.

[Skipping stuff I don't know anything about.]

4.4. Minimum and maximum font size

| 'auto' means that the user agent determine the minimum readable
| font-size for the media. For example, a value is 9px is recommended
| for Latin scripts.

s/is 9px/of 9px/
I'm not sure that "9px" is correct here. You surely need at least 9 dots
height to form all Latin letters, but is this really "9px" with "px" in the
CSS sense?

| the fonts of the last line of an element are not allowed to become
| larger than the larger of 'font-size' and 'max-font-size'.
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Are min- and max-font-size only of use in conjunction with
text-align-last:size;? Instinctively I'd guess, it was possible to define
e.g.

  body {font-size: 18px}
  ul {font-size: inherit}
  li {font-size: 67%; min-font-size: 9px}

to get readable fonts in nested lists.

6.3. Word breaking

| Name: word-break-CJK

Wasn't there a (unwritten) rule to have all CSS properties lowercase?

Had there been considerations to add a possibility to CSS to allow authors
to specify a (custom) cross-browser hyphenation dictionary?

7.2. White-space control

| Name: linefeed-treatment

I think the property values are self-explaining, but too long. Can you
rename treat-as-space -> space, treat-as-zero-width-space -> zero-width,
ignore-if-after-linefeed > no-double?

| Name: white-space-treatment

The same as above. ignore-if-before-linefeed -> before,
ignore-if-after-linefeed -> after, ignore-if-surrounding-linefeed ->
surrounding.

7.3. Text overflow

| The hint is typically an ellipsis character "..."

But you're using three characters here. I presume you mean the Unicode
character that's behind &hellip; (too lazy to check its number) or an
appropriate alternative. Same for the initial value of
text-overflow-ellipsis.
The following example isn't marked up like the others (no maroon background
etc.). Also use blockquote instead of div.citation.
I wonder if not a pseudo-element ::ellipsis would be more convenient.

9. Text decoration

I've written some comments about that chapter of the previous draft a few
days ago, most of those still apply.

9.5. Other text decoration simple properties

| Name: text-underline-position

Everywhere else a value for automatic selection is called "auto", here it's
"auto-pos", any particular reason for that decision?

| Name: text-blink

| Conforming CSS2 user agents are not required to support this value.

What about conforming CSS3 UAs?

11.1. Capitalization

Just had the strange idea of a "kEwL" "h4x0R" or "hacker" value for the
text-transform property, randomizing the case of the characters.

12. Properties index

| In addition to the specified values, all properties take the [table]

The what? The "inherit" value?

Final Thoughts:

It seems as if you've done quite a job in CSS i18n, the backlash is, that
there's *a lot* of confusing, uninteresting information for us Latin script
writers. UA stylesheets aren't anymore useful without support for :lang(), I
guess.
There're some inconsequencies in refering to HTML/XHTML and their elements.
You see "<br> XHTML element" (with <code>&lt;br&gt;</code>) as well as "IMG
HTML element" (without <code/>), please keep one representation.

Christoph

Received on Friday, 25 October 2002 12:31:00 UTC