W3C

– DRAFT –
I18N ⇔ CSS

16 April 2024

Attendees

Present
fantasai, florian, r12a, xfq
Regrets
-
Chair
-
Scribe
xfq

Meeting minutes

<r12a> thanks for the reminder, looking for the link...

Agenda

<florian> Html ruby extension fpwd CFC: w3c/htmlwg#26

<gb> Issue 26 CFC: Publish HTML Ruby Markup Extensions FPWD (by LJWatson)

florian: in the HTML WG the CfC for publishing the HTML Ruby Markup Extensions spec just went out today
… link ^

https://w3c.github.io/html-ruby/

[css-content] Quote character choice must depend on surrounding language, not language of the quotation

w3c/csswg-drafts#5478

<gb> Issue 5478 [css-content] Quote character choice must depend on surrounding language, not language of the quotation (by r12a) [css-content-3] [Closed Accepted by CSSWG Resolution] [i18n-needs-resolution] [Agenda+ i18n]

fantasai: it's been edited and I haven't republished the draft yet

florian: does that include that part needs to go into the UA style sheet, or just the mechanics of it?

florian: make the initial value do the right thing, or make the UA style sheet do the right thing?

fantasai: the only way to do that automatically would be to make the value of the quote property to depend on @@
… without a separate selector I don't think it's possible to get it to do the right thing
… that brings up a question of the selectors might not be the most efficient

florian: @@1

fantasai: if what you're trying to do is as soon as you hit a q element then you lock it down you could do it on any child

<fantasai> q > * { quotes: match-parent; }

xfq: do you mean the author should specify this?

r12a: that's the thing I'm arguing against
… I don't think the author needs to remember or find out how to make the default expectation
… and it should happen by default

<fantasai> q { quote: auto-compute-me-now; } /* iherits as string value */

r12a: whether that happens because we put something in a style sheet or whether that happens because the initial value

florian: do you think browsers will be happier with @@?

fantasai: I don't know

florian: but you're probably reasonably well-positioned to ask people who would know

xfq: @@

r12a: it's not supposed to respond to changes in languages further down

fantasai: it's because if you set the initial value to a value on the root element and it computes on the root element rather than inheriting the auto
… from what I understand, you don't want either of these behaviours

florian: and I think the thing with a selector in the UA style sheet does give us the right behaviour
… it's just not the kind of thing we typically want to

xfq: what's the next step?

fantasai: we can go back to browser vendors and ask them which approach they want to take here

florian: can we agree on a UA style sheet rule that is the most performant and acceptable we can think of
… that gives us the behaviour we want and then we tell the browsers are you either willing to implement this or do you have another suggestion?

florian: you want the first q element in the hierarchy
… lock down every descendant of it

fantasai: right now we have match-parent, but instead of computing against the parent's language it computes against your own language
… which is match-self

<fantasai> <p lang=fr>Some text <q lang=en> more text <q lang=zh> inner text</q></q></p>

fantasai: so we have this, what you want here is you want French quotations all the way through

r12a: yeah

florian: the auto keyword means that you pick a quotation system based on the content language of the parent
… so exactly what we want on the first q element

fantasai: instead of saying it matches the same quotation mark system as the parent, we want a keyword that computes against the parent
… you can't do that as initial value because it breaks stuff

florian: effectively that's kind of what match-parent does
… match-parent gets that string from above, while auto doesn't and re-resolves it everywhere

fantasai: what are impls do currently is a good question

florian: they do the wrong thing

<fantasai> auto = resolve against the current element's language

<fantasai> (and inherit as 'auto', so re-resolve on each element)

<fantasai> match-parent = resolve against the parent eleent's langauge

<fantasai> (and inherit as that string, so don't re-resolve)

florian: when do you ever want to resolve against the current element's language?

fantasai: @@

florian: from my point of view, the way you have it specified now, is precisely the behaviour you want
… as far as the q element is concerned

florian: what do you want for blockquote?

florian: possibly the same, but I'm not sure

r12a: I don't think a blockquote is the same thing as a q element
… I'm just thinking off the top of my head at the moment
… a blockquote is bit of text that you indented usually
… the blockquote at the top level would take the quotes of the surrounding language
… but inside of it, it's different

florian: in that case, we're fine
… I still think we're on the right behaviour with the spec as it is plus the UA style sheet rule

fantasai: here's a fun wrinkle I think we didn't think about
… if the quote is not generated by the q element, but by ::before, which is a child of the q element
… match-parent should use the language tag of the parent to resolve to a string

florian: @@
… that's still not good enough, it's good enough to make it work, but we also need to disable that on descendant <q>s

florian: I thought we had the solution, but I forgot the ::before in the child

r12a: I find it very difficult to follow all the stuff you're talking about because I don't know the technical details

florian: I think we really understand the use case that you want to achieve, but it's surprisingly tricky to get there

<fantasai> q { quotes: match-parent; } q q { quotes: inherit; }

<r12a> fuqiao, here's a link: r12a/mins2issue

fantasai: this is not as bad as an universal selector because q is not very often used
… even if you have to walk up the parent up to the route every time you hit a queue, you're not gonna hit a q very often
… so it won't regress most pages probably

florian: we now have a definition that probably works and a selector that's less problematic
… still not amazing, but probably works
… maybe we should update the spec
… and talk with the browser vendors

fantasai: that seems reasonable
… back to blockquote

florian: maybe it's just parent, not match-parent

fantasai: auto-parent or something like that

florian: we should write it down

fantasai: and ask the browser vendors

florian: I'm curious how often is this something people run into and complained about

xfq: I've seen some real examples in paper books

r12a: I've seen real web pages too
… I use the q element myself
… it's really useful for things like translation
… you don't have to go through all the hard coded quote marks and change them
… you just change the CSS

close #18

<gb> Closed issue #18

Languages / writing systems with 2 line breaking conventions in common use?

w3c/i18n-discuss#11

<gb> Issue 11 Languages / writing systems with 2 line breaking conventions in common use? (by frivoal)

florian: I think we conlcuded on this one last time
… and the conclusion was not the one I was hoping for, but that's a conclusion nonetheless
… some years ago Myles replied to my proposal keep-hangul
… Myles said this is probably not unique to Korean
… the i18n research into Ethiopic seems to show that it's not a one langauge problem but a two language problem already
… it's probably an N language problem

florian: are there context where you may be facing where user generated input in arbitrary languages
… might be Ethiopic/Korean/Korean so you have to have the value of the property be auto

<r12a> https://www.w3.org/TR/khmr-lreq/

AOB

r12a: I've been working on a FPWD for Khmer lreq
… originally I copied the stuff I have in my own site into this page
… but I'm worried about IP issues
… and it takes a long time to create the pages even though I'm just copying
… because it's quite a lot of adjustments
… and I have to matintain the same material in 2 different locations
… I've stripped out the text that is identical to the sutff in my documents
… and add a link

fantasai: I have a couple questions
… first of all, all of the work you're doing under the area of i18n research and documentation is reasonably considered part of your job, you should get paid for that
… you can ask your manager to increase the amount of time that you're alotted

r12a: I don't want to do that because I want more flexibility

fantasai: the second thing is this presents a bit of risk of what happens many years later when you and your website are not going to be around
… or github.io goes down because it's not free anymore

r12a: I want complete control of the information and no obligation to work on the information

<r12a> fuqiao, don't forget to use my mins2issue tool - the page to package the information and instructions for use should be available from the link to the repo, but of course ping me if you get stuck

Minutes manually created (not a transcript), formatted by scribe.perl version 222 (Sat Jul 22 21:57:07 2023 UTC).