[css-align] Use of word 'justify'

[r12a]

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-align/

The spec has properties with names like justify-content, justify-self and justify-items.

A much more appropriate alternative, imho, would be arrange-content/self/items (borrowing from Powerpoint's UI). (If we wanted to go further we could swap arrange-content and align-content (etc) so that align refers to inline direction, and arrange to line-stacking direction, because that works better with the current text-align concept.)

This worries me because content authors already have difficulties understanding the difference between text-align: justify and the text-justify property, and now we seem to be introducing another sense for 'justify', for something which i actually think is alignment rather than justification. For me (and for Bringhurst) justification is to do with setting text flush left and right on a line. (Note the words 'text', and 'flush'. Some of the justify- options in css-align don't produce flush alignments.)

Other possibilities might be line-align vs. stack-align, etc.. But i don't think justify is appropriate or helpful here.

The i18n WG endorses this comment.

[fantasai]

Hi Richard,
I'm sorry to say we can't do anything about the names of these properties now. They were released with the initial release of Flexbox back in 2012, and have been widely deployed on content ever since. We're going to have to close this issue as no-change.

I think if we were to go back in time, we would have made the axes 100% flow-relative and just used inline- and block- as prefixes. But too late now!

[r12a]

The i18n WG agreed to close this issue, and closed its tracker.