[css-text] Enclosed alphanumerics and text-align:capitalize

i was wondering about how to treat enclosed alphanumerics when text-align is set to capitalize. See the test results at http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/results/text-transform wrt uppercase or lowercase transforms, the spec simply says "Puts all letters in lowercase", or vice versa, and that seems to me appropriate, for those characters that have Unicode mappings. The tests text-transform-upperlower-026.html, text-transform-upperlower-027.html indicate that this is what happens across all major desktop browsers. For text-transform: capitalize, however, the spec says "Puts the first *typographic letter unit* of each word in titlecase" (my emphasis). As you can see in test text-transform-capitalize-031.html, it makes sense when punctuation and the like precede the actual word of the text to look for the first real letter. (All browsers pass that test.) it's not clear to me, however, whether a word that only consists of enclosed alphanumerics (which don't fit the definition of 'typgraphic letter unit'), or even one that starts with an enclosed alphanumeric block character, should be not title cased: see the results of text-transform-capitalize-026.html. Firefox currently does not. Chrome and Safari, on the other hand do titlecase per the Unicode data. IE titlecases everything except the first word on the page. i can't imagine that people will want to do this very often, so this seems much like an edge case, but i thought i'd ask the question, all the same. what's the answer? ri

Hello Richard, I think this is a difficult call. On the one hand, it makes sense to change the first letter in a string of enclosed letters. On the other hand, it doesn't make sense to change it if it's part of some punctuation (e.g. from as part of a list or some such). So the alternatives are either to make this context-dependent or to just choose a solution and stick with it. My guess is that this is an edge case, so just picking the currently more popular solution and sticking with it may be best. Regards, Martin. On 2015/03/11 00:29, Richard Ishida wrote: > > i was wondering about how to treat enclosed alphanumerics when > text-align is set to capitalize. > > See the test results at > http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/results/text-transform > > wrt uppercase or lowercase transforms, the spec simply says "Puts all > letters in lowercase", or vice versa, and that seems to me appropriate, > for those characters that have Unicode mappings. The tests > text-transform-upperlower-026.html, text-transform-upperlower-027.html > indicate that this is what happens across all major desktop browsers. > > For text-transform: capitalize, however, the spec says "Puts the first > *typographic letter unit* of each word in titlecase" (my emphasis). As > you can see in test text-transform-capitalize-031.html, it makes sense > when punctuation and the like precede the actual word of the text to > look for the first real letter. (All browsers pass that test.) > > it's not clear to me, however, whether a word that only consists of > enclosed alphanumerics (which don't fit the definition of 'typgraphic > letter unit'), or even one that starts with an enclosed alphanumeric > block character, should be not title cased: see the results of > text-transform-capitalize-026.html. Firefox currently does not. Chrome > and Safari, on the other hand do titlecase per the Unicode data. IE > titlecases everything except the first word on the page. > > i can't imagine that people will want to do this very often, so this > seems much like an edge case, but i thought i'd ask the question, all > the same. > > what's the answer? > > ri > > > > > > >

It seems to me very unfortunate that the enclosed alphanumeric characters have case mappings at all, because their typographic use is primarily as symbols, not as letters. As such, I would expect their 'casing' to be fixed, and not to be affected by capitalisation. So, for instance, I would expect capitalisation of this string ⓐalpha to be ⓐAlpha not Ⓐalpha JH -- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com If stung by another man's bee, one must calculate the extent of the injury, but also, if one swatted it in the process, subtract the replacement value of the bee. — Mediaeval Irish legalism

On 13/3/15 21:34, John Hudson wrote: > It seems to me very unfortunate that the enclosed alphanumeric > characters have case mappings at all, because their typographic use is > primarily as symbols, not as letters. As such, I would expect their > 'casing' to be fixed, and not to be affected by capitalisation. So, for > instance, I would expect capitalisation of this string > > ⓐalpha > to be > ⓐAlpha > not > Ⓐalpha I agree this is the most reasonable behavior. Browsers differ on this; Gecko will render your example as ⓐAlpha, whereas WebKit and Blink produce "Ⓐalpha". According to the current CSS Text spec, Gecko's behavior here is correct, AFAICT. However, the test at [1] disagrees. JK [1] http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/run?base=css-text-3&batch=text-transform&test=text-transform/text-transform-capitalize-026.html

On 14/03/2015 19:04, Jonathan Kew wrote: > According to the current CSS Text spec, Gecko's behavior here is > correct, AFAICT. However, the test at [1] disagrees. > > JK > > > [1] > http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/run?base=css-text-3&batch=text-transform&test=text-transform/text-transform-capitalize-026.html fwiw, it's true that, currently, the test at [1] does what Unicode suggests by default, rather than what the CSS spec says. I'm just want to be sure before i change it. I'm personally inclined agree with John and Jonathan, that the CSS spec is right. I assume that these characters are used mainly as symbols, rather than to form words. I just don't feel i'm sufficiently aware of all the possible use cases to be sure. ri

On 03/10/2015 11:29 AM, Richard Ishida wrote: > > i was wondering about how to treat enclosed alphanumerics when text-align is set to capitalize. > > See the test results at http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/results/text-transform > > wrt uppercase or lowercase transforms, the spec simply says "Puts all letters in lowercase", or vice versa, and that seems to > me appropriate, for those characters that have Unicode mappings. The tests text-transform-upperlower-026.html, > text-transform-upperlower-027.html indicate that this is what happens across all major desktop browsers. > > For text-transform: capitalize, however, the spec says "Puts the first *typographic letter unit* of each word in titlecase" > (my emphasis). As you can see in test text-transform-capitalize-031.html, it makes sense when punctuation and the like > precede the actual word of the text to look for the first real letter. (All browsers pass that test.) > > it's not clear to me, however, whether a word that only consists of enclosed alphanumerics (which don't fit the definition of > 'typgraphic letter unit'), or even one that starts with an enclosed alphanumeric block character, should be not title cased: > see the results of text-transform-capitalize-026.html. Firefox currently does not. Chrome and Safari, on the other hand do > titlecase per the Unicode data. IE titlecases everything except the first word on the page. > > i can't imagine that people will want to do this very often, so this seems much like an edge case, but i thought i'd ask the > question, all the same. > > what's the answer? I think we should go with whatever the Unicode case mapping files define, and adjust the CSS spec wording to match. ~fantasai

On 18/3/15 03:15, fantasai wrote: > On 03/10/2015 11:29 AM, Richard Ishida wrote: >> >> i was wondering about how to treat enclosed alphanumerics when >> text-align is set to capitalize. >> >> See the test results at >> http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/results/text-transform >> >> wrt uppercase or lowercase transforms, the spec simply says "Puts all >> letters in lowercase", or vice versa, and that seems to >> me appropriate, for those characters that have Unicode mappings. The >> tests text-transform-upperlower-026.html, >> text-transform-upperlower-027.html indicate that this is what happens >> across all major desktop browsers. >> >> For text-transform: capitalize, however, the spec says "Puts the first >> *typographic letter unit* of each word in titlecase" >> (my emphasis). As you can see in test >> text-transform-capitalize-031.html, it makes sense when punctuation >> and the like >> precede the actual word of the text to look for the first real letter. >> (All browsers pass that test.) >> >> it's not clear to me, however, whether a word that only consists of >> enclosed alphanumerics (which don't fit the definition of >> 'typgraphic letter unit'), or even one that starts with an enclosed >> alphanumeric block character, should be not title cased: >> see the results of text-transform-capitalize-026.html. Firefox >> currently does not. Chrome and Safari, on the other hand do >> titlecase per the Unicode data. IE titlecases everything except the >> first word on the page. >> >> i can't imagine that people will want to do this very often, so this >> seems much like an edge case, but i thought i'd ask the >> question, all the same. >> >> what's the answer? > > I think we should go with whatever the Unicode case mapping files > define, and adjust the CSS spec wording to match. Sorry to keep beating on this issue, but I'm not sure that really answers the question here. This isn't primarily about what's in the case mapping files -- which deal only with individual Unicode characters -- but about identifying the "typographic letter units" to which the case mapping should be applied. The current CSS 'capitalize' transform is quite different in that regard from the toTitlecase(s) function[1] defined by Unicode, which as far as I can recall is the nearest parallel: # R3 toTitlecase(X): Find the word boundaries in X according to # Unicode Standard Annex #29, “Unicode Text Segmentation.” For each # word boundary, find the first cased character F following the word # boundary. If F exists, map F to Titlecase_Mapping(F); then map all # characters C between F and the following word boundary to # Lowercase_Mapping(C). In general terms, the key issue here is that toTitlecase applies case mappings to all the letters of a word (Titlecase to the first, and Lowercase to the rest), whereas the CSS property applies Titlecase to the first letter and leaves the rest unchanged. Therefore, given content such as Ramsay MacDonald visits the USA text-transform:capitalize will result in Ramsay MacDonald Visits The USA whereas Unicode's toTitlecase() would give Ramsay Macdonald Visits The Usa which I don't think is desirable. Given this difference in approach, I think we should continue to let CSS Text define exactly what text-transform:capitalize does -- in particular, which characters it affects -- rather than delegating this to Unicode. As Richard points out, the current draft of CSS Text excludes the enclosed alphanumerics ⓐⓑⓒ etc. from its definition of "typographic letter units", and therefore they should also be excluded from the "words" that 'capitalize' affects. IMO, that's the most reasonable option: these characters are more symbol- or dingbat-like than letter-like, as reflected in their Unicode General Category of "So". So I'd like the WG to confirm that this is the correct interpretation of the spec. A further issue that I don't think has been mentioned here relates to the 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' transforms. ISTM that these transforms, too, should only affect "letters" (or "typographic letter units", as CSS Text likes to call them) and should leave Symbol characters untouched, even though some Symbol characters -- by no means all the "enclosed letter-based" ones -- do have case mappings. The CSS Text draft is less clear about this, inasmuch as it fails to link the term "letters" in 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' to a definition in the Terminology section (as earlier drafts did), but the only plausible interpretation I can see is that "letter" here is shorthand for "typographic letter unit", and so once again the Symbol characters are excluded. AFAIK, all engines -- including Gecko, which gets 'capitalize' right by this interpretation -- currently mishandle this, and apply case mappings to Symbol characters. However, I doubt that changing our behavior to match the spec here is likely to "break the Web" in any substantial way, and it would put us in a more consistent and predictable state. (It would seem odd that 'text-transform:uppercase' affects ⓐⓑⓒ if 'text-transform:capitalize' does not; or that 'text-transform:lowercase' affects ⒶⒷⒸ but not 🅐🅑🅒.) In summary, I think the CSS Text spec should maintain its definition of these transforms as applying only to letters, and should reinstate its link to the definition of "[typographic] letter [unit]" for 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' to reinforce this. An informative note could be added alerting implementers to the fact that some non-Letter characters have case mappings defined in Unicode, but should *not* be affected by these text-transform values. JK [1] http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode7.0.0/ch03.pdf, page 154.

On 23/03/2015 18:29, Jonathan Kew wrote: > A further issue that I don't think has been mentioned here relates to > the 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' transforms. ISTM that these transforms, > too, should only affect "letters" (or "typographic letter units", as CSS > Text likes to call them) and should leave Symbol characters untouched, > even though some Symbol characters -- by no means all the "enclosed > letter-based" ones -- do have case mappings. The CSS Text draft is less > clear about this, inasmuch as it fails to link the term "letters" in > 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' to a definition in the Terminology section > (as earlier drafts did), but the only plausible interpretation I can see > is that "letter" here is shorthand for "typographic letter unit", and so > once again the Symbol characters are excluded. > > AFAIK, all engines -- including Gecko, which gets 'capitalize' right by > this interpretation -- currently mishandle this, and apply case mappings > to Symbol characters. However, I doubt that changing our behavior to > match the spec here is likely to "break the Web" in any substantial way, > and it would put us in a more consistent and predictable state. (It > would seem odd that 'text-transform:uppercase' affects ⓐⓑⓒ if > 'text-transform:capitalize' does not; or that 'text-transform:lowercase' > affects ⒶⒷⒸ but not 🅐🅑🅒.) > > In summary, I think the CSS Text spec should maintain its definition of > these transforms as applying only to letters, and should reinstate its > link to the definition of "[typographic] letter [unit]" for 'uppercase' > and 'lowercase' to reinforce this. An informative note could be added > alerting implementers to the fact that some non-Letter characters have > case mappings defined in Unicode, but should *not* be affected by these > text-transform values. actually, i'm inclined to disagree here. i tend to agree that capitalize should not affect enclosed alphanumerics, mainly because i can't really imagine use cases where people will want words made of these things, like Ⓐⓑⓒ, and i expect that they are more likely to be used as counters, in which case you'd want them all uppercase or all lowercase, and unaffected by capitalisation. i can, however, see situations where i might want to convert lowercase enclosed alphanumeric counters to uppercase, or vice versa, using styling rather than by changing the actual characters (cf. number forms, which are similar and behave in the same way)[ⅰ] – and so i think that the difference in behaviour between capitalize on the one hand and uppercase/lowercase on the other is ok. Furthermore, i'm worried that changing the spec may break some usage of these characters (albeit small in number) in legacy content, given the fact that browsers currently seem to unanimously agree in their support of upper/lowercase for these characters. so in my view, the spec already says what should happen, and we don't need to change it. ri [ⅰ] http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/results/text-transform#upperlower

On 24/3/15 16:05, Richard Ishida wrote: > On 23/03/2015 18:29, Jonathan Kew wrote: >> A further issue that I don't think has been mentioned here relates to >> the 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' transforms. ISTM that these transforms, >> too, should only affect "letters" (or "typographic letter units", as CSS >> Text likes to call them) and should leave Symbol characters untouched, >> even though some Symbol characters -- by no means all the "enclosed >> letter-based" ones -- do have case mappings. The CSS Text draft is less >> clear about this, inasmuch as it fails to link the term "letters" in >> 'uppercase' and 'lowercase' to a definition in the Terminology section >> (as earlier drafts did), but the only plausible interpretation I can see >> is that "letter" here is shorthand for "typographic letter unit", and so >> once again the Symbol characters are excluded. >> >> AFAIK, all engines -- including Gecko, which gets 'capitalize' right by >> this interpretation -- currently mishandle this, and apply case mappings >> to Symbol characters. However, I doubt that changing our behavior to >> match the spec here is likely to "break the Web" in any substantial way, >> and it would put us in a more consistent and predictable state. (It >> would seem odd that 'text-transform:uppercase' affects ⓐⓑⓒ if >> 'text-transform:capitalize' does not; or that 'text-transform:lowercase' >> affects ⒶⒷⒸ but not 🅐🅑🅒.) >> >> In summary, I think the CSS Text spec should maintain its definition of >> these transforms as applying only to letters, and should reinstate its >> link to the definition of "[typographic] letter [unit]" for 'uppercase' >> and 'lowercase' to reinforce this. An informative note could be added >> alerting implementers to the fact that some non-Letter characters have >> case mappings defined in Unicode, but should *not* be affected by these >> text-transform values. > > actually, i'm inclined to disagree here. > > i tend to agree that capitalize should not affect enclosed > alphanumerics, mainly because i can't really imagine use cases where > people will want words made of these things, like Ⓐⓑⓒ, and i expect that > they are more likely to be used as counters, in which case you'd want > them all uppercase or all lowercase, and unaffected by capitalisation. > > i can, however, see situations where i might want to convert lowercase > enclosed alphanumeric counters to uppercase, or vice versa, using > styling rather than by changing the actual characters (cf. number forms, > which are similar and behave in the same way)[ⅰ] – and so i think that > the difference in behaviour between capitalize on the one hand and > uppercase/lowercase on the other is ok. Furthermore, i'm worried that > changing the spec may break some usage of these characters (albeit small > in number) in legacy content, given the fact that browsers currently > seem to unanimously agree in their support of upper/lowercase for these > characters. I could live with that -- I'm not thrilled about the different treatment of those characters in capitalize vs upper/lowercase, but I don't really feel strongly about it.... > so in my view, the spec already says what should happen, and we don't > need to change it. ...but in this case, the spec needs to adjust its definition of 'uppercase' and 'lowercase', which currently says they apply to "letters". The only definition of "letter" I can find in the spec[1] is as an alternative for "typographic letter unit", which does not include Symbol characters. JK [1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-text/#characters

On 03/10/2015 03:29 PM, Richard Ishida wrote: > > i was wondering about how to treat enclosed alphanumerics when text-align is set to capitalize. > > See the test results at http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/results/text-transform Based on the discussion that followed, particularly John Hudson and Jonathan Kew's comments in http://www.w3.org/mid/550357F1.9010505@tiro.com https://www.w3.org/mid/55105B93.40208@gmail.com I'm inclined to maintain the case-transform restriction to letters. Unless i18n objects, I'll confirm with the WG shortly. ~fantasai

On 09/25/2016 02:22 AM, fantasai wrote: > On 03/10/2015 03:29 PM, Richard Ishida wrote: >> >> i was wondering about how to treat enclosed alphanumerics when text-align is set to capitalize. >> >> See the test results at http://www.w3.org/International/tests/repo/results/text-transform > > Based on the discussion that followed, particularly John Hudson > and Jonathan Kew's comments in >     http://www.w3.org/mid/550357F1.9010505@tiro.com >     https://www.w3.org/mid/55105B93.40208@gmail.com > I'm inclined to maintain the case-transform restriction to letters. > Unless i18n objects, I'll confirm with the WG shortly. Just to follow-up, this was resolved in https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2016Oct/0068.html Thanks i18n for updating the test! ~fantasai