[writing-modes] Boustrophedon

[litherum]

I wonder if this bidi behavior is worth adding facilities for in CSS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon. Alternate lines have horizontally reversed characters, so the flow of reading flows back and forth across the page. It's sort of like specifying <bdo> on every other line.

(It's low priority, but maybe worth considering?)

[Crissov]

It has been mentioned before, but was not considered worthy of addition at the time.

• 2016 Nov
• 2004 May
• 2001 Feb

Historically, there have been variants with non-mirrored, horizontally mirrored, vertically and horizontally mirrored glyphs.

[tabatkins]

Yeah, since its usage is purely historical, with no living language using it, it hasn't been considered worth puzzling out the difficulties, and spending time speccing/implementing/testing it.

[AmeliaBR]

It would be a very interesting case study for early experiments with a Houdini inline text layout module, though… (e.g., as discussed in w3c/css-houdini-drafts#854)

[fantasai]

Thanks for digging up the history, @Crissov :)

Closing out based on previous CSSWG decisions. @litherum Please re-open and tag against css-writing-modes-5 if you think this is actually worth spending time on.