[css-text] Add title case text transformation

[tester1230293]

Probably has been mentioned before, but CSS currently supports uppercase, lowercase, and capitalize via the text-transform property. However, there is no native way to apply "proper case" (aka title case) formatting, where the first letter of each significant word is capitalized, and small function words (e.g., "and", "of", "the") remain lowercase unless at the beginning of a sentence.

[tabatkins]

Yup, dupe of #8893

[tester1230293]

Yup, dupe of #8893

That one is a bit different. There sentence would look something like this: "Hello all. It is a nice day!" while my request would look like this: "Hello all. It is a Nice Day!" basically capitalizing every word except the small ones.

[SebastianZ]

I also don't think this is a duplicate. Sentence case refers to turning the first letter of a sentence into uppercase, while proper case/title case capitalizes the first letter of every word with the exception of a few specific words.

[tabatkins]

You're right, dupe of this 2015 email thread ^_^

[SebastianZ]

This requires some special rules and is generally restricted to English, as far as I know. It might be applied to other languages, though in any case it requires grammatical knowledge or at least a list of words in each language that should be written in lowercase.
And, as far as I can see looking at different descriptions and tools like https://titlecaseconverter.com, there are several different definitions for how to title case.

So I don't think it's worth implementing directly into UAs as new keyword (or several) for text-transform. Though it might be something that could be achieved by extending custom transforms as proposed in #3132. See also the proposed spec. by @frivoal.

This would at least require some logic for recognizing punctuation in the @text-transform rule, though.

Sebastian

[Crissov]

The @text-transform proposal would just need an exception descriptor for this. It would take a list of words as strings that should not be altered. Issue 9 about language-specific rules should be solved for that first.

/* Language Descriptor Variant: */
@text-transform --title-case {
  language: en;
  transform: capitalize;
  exception: 'the', 'a', 'an', 'in', 'on', 'of', 'off', 'out' 'at', 'for', 'and', 'or', 'with', 'without', 'to', 'too', 'not', /*…*/ ;
}
/* Language Selector Variant: */
@text-transform --title-case:lang(en) {
  transform: capitalize;
  exception: /* … */;
}

This will not be able to enforce more complicated extra rules like “the final word is exempt from exceptions” or “articles are still capitalized before singular nouns”.

PS: The proposal does not require initial double hyphens but supports them.

[SebastianZ]

I've just posted a similar proposal to @Crissov's in #3132. Though I didn't consider taking languages into account.

Sebastian