CSS WG Blog Minutes and Resolutions Oslo F2F Wednesday…

Minutes and Resolutions Oslo F2F Wednesday 2010-08-25: Fonts, UI, Writing Modes, i18n, Template Layout, Values and Units

Testing and PR

John Daggett from Mozilla took Microsoft’s marketing dept. to task for publishing PR articles using test results from unreviewed Microsoft tests “that wouldn’t even pass Microsoft’s internal review” while implying that they were accepted by W3C.

Advice for the future use of test results in marketing materials include:

• Giving some kind of advance notification about the tests and the intent to publish test results based on them to other browser vendors, and promptly fixing any reported test errors.
• Using only reviewed tests for marketing purposes.
• Just generally making a good faith effort when publishing test results comparing products.

Fonts

jdaggett reviewed the font-variant-* features. Comments included:

• font-variant-ligatures should note that it doesn’t affect required ligatures.
• Many members of the WG are (still) concerned about the use of numeric alternate glyph selection in font-variant-alternates in a way that does not tie the numbers to specific fonts, the problem being that the numbered options would be applied to fallback fonts, resulting in unexpected glyph selections. jdaggett protested that this isn’t a problem in reality while Adobe asserted that it will become more and more of a problem over time as use of advanced font technology increases. Several alternatives were proposed:
  • Allowing numeric glyph selection only via @font-face.
  • Using a functional notation to tie that selection to a specific font family.
  • Using an at-rule to match named identifiers to pairs of numeric selections and font-family names. (This has the added benefit of giving the author an obvious way to note what such numbers mean to any future maintainers.)
• Suggestion to have petite-caps fall back to small-caps. jdaggett to mark this in the spec as an issue.
• Discussed jdaggett’s proposal to CSSify font-feature-settings syntax by using idents and functional notation in place of strings. Bert noted that this may conflict with things like attr(), so the WG suggested prefixing each value with ot-. Also discussed error-handling.
• Noted that font-language-override‘s values are OT lang codes, not ISO lang codes. One suggestion was to accept ISO lang codes as idents and OT lang codes as strings.
• Resolved: Publish new CSS3 Fonts Working Draft.
• Some discussion about font family names inside fonts and how to make use of them across platforms.

Writing Modes

• Discussed various solutions for dealing with vertical writing modes and the resulting directional transformations.
• Several strongly against :ttb solution, since it is supposedly a pseudo-class, but is selecting a property of the UA, not of the element. Media Queries are seen as a more appropriate place to detect features of the UA environment.
• The WG favors alternate style sheets for writing mode switching, since they give the most versatile solution. Some guidelines are needed to allow standardized tagging of alternate styles. But once those are in place, EPUB can choose what switches it needs, similar to defining a microformat. And other products can similarly define standardized switches for other things.
• Some comments made about detecting vertical writing support, but nothing definite.
• Some discussion of the cascading problems with margin-start/end/before/after. And also the similar but somewhat different case of margin-outside/inside, whose directions must be computed as pages are laid out and cannot be resolved during the cascade.
• ReResolved: Physical directions stay physical: margin-left will always refer to the left side, not the top or right side based on physical directions.

#rrggbbaa

Resolved: Add #rrggbbaa to CSS4 Color.

CSS3 UI and UI Selectors

• Tantek is going through the old Candidate Recommendation and will be re-issuing an Last Call Working Draft that removes all unimplemented features and adds related features that have two+ implementations (such as ointer-events and overflow-x/overflow-y).
• There was a suggestion to extract the selectors in this draft into a standalone UI Selectors module.
• dbaron wrote a list of 5 requirements for ::selection: WG agrees with all of them; problem is now a matter of defining a model that accommodates all of them.

i18n: list-styles and Indic layout

Discussed request for list-style: auto: Authors can already map list styles to languages with :lang(), so this feature does not seem necessary. Also, it would require a great deal of research to specify adequately. The CSSWG would consider adding the feature described if someone else did the necessary research to draw up an exhaustive table mapping lang codes to list-style-types and the Internationalization Working Group approved it.

A new group at W3C is planning to draw up requirements for Indic layout, similar to the JLTF efforts.

CSS Template Layout

Discussed Hyatt’s proposal

to alter syntax to make prefixing easier (which has the side effect of making the style sheet easier to understand, especially for someone unfamiliar with the Template module). The WG votes to add slot() notation to the ‘position’ values and to wrap the template strings in functional notation rather than add a new property as in Hyatt’s proposal.

CSS3 Values and Units and calc()

Proposed to move CSS3 Values and Units to Candidate Recommendation to get calc() out. Starting by trimming any unfinished features and drawing up an at-risk list in prepartion for Last Call. This would mean: dropping fr and gr units, since they aren’t standalone units anyway; and marking vh, vw, vm, and min() and max() at-risk.

Full minutes

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