[css-text-decor] Characters to skip for emphasis marks (text-emphasis)

[fantasai]

Opening a placeholder issue to continue any discussion from https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Dec/0184.html and https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2016Dec/0083.html

presumably these marks should not be displayed for combining characters either?

Actually there was a related discussion raised recently in HTML5 Chinese IG as well. That discussion is about whether emphasis marks should also be skipped for punctuations. JLReq explicitly says emphasis marks are not used for several punctuations (see 3.3.9 note 2), but the spec doesn't have anything around this.

It was considered [1], but IIRC JLTF wanted us to include all punctuation and make the author do the skipping because "what if the author wants to emphasize that punctuation mark for some reason". Imho this is an uncomfortable default for the Web because it means most publications need to do a lot of markup mangling to get this to work right... but we ended up deferring to that opinion. Maybe Koji remembers more, I can't seem to find records of the discussion.

See http://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/#text-emphasis-skip for what was our last set of thoughts on the issue.

I'm happy to re-open the discussion if there's more input to consider.

For background, see https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2016Dec/0083.html https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/#text-emphasis-skip and view-source:https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/Overview.bs

[fantasai]

Discussed with i18n, conclusion is that skipping punctuation by default would be better. Question to CSSWG: can we make that happen.

[aphillips]

(on behalf of I18N WG)

As @fantasai mentions, we discussed this yesterday in teleconference. I drew an action to respond to this issue.

According to JLREQ (and other information that we have gathered, such as information about Chinese and Korean), the normal behavior for emphasis marks would be to skip punctuation marks. Ideally, the default mode for emphasis marks would correspond to their normal usage.

@fantasai reports that text-decoration Level 4 is expected to include tailoring for emphasis marks to add (or remove) emphasis from punctuation.

She also reports that you discussed this with JLTF and they requested the current behavior (not skipping punctuation) because "what if you wanted to emphasize those characters for some reason". That is a rational point of view, but means that, to get the normally expected behavior, one must modify the markup and/or styling and it's a little inconvenient (imagine having to put closing and opening em tags around a comma in the middle of a sentence).

The members present in the call felt that skipping the punctuation would be better, since it gives casual users the expected behavior, provided that exceptional behavior is provided for in Level 4 fairly soon.

If the current behavior were kept, then Level 4 should add the punctuation skipping override fairly soon and the default stylesheet should adopt that. Either approach is equivalent, but it would be better, in our opinion, to adopt the "normal" styling now.

[css-meeting-bot]

The Working Group just discussed [css-text-decor] Characters to skip for emphasis marks (text-emphasis), and agreed to the following resolutions:

• RESOLVED: change the default behavior for emphasis marks in the current level of text decoration spec

The full IRC log of that discussion

<dael> Topic: [css-text-decor] Characters to skip for emphasis marks (text-emphasis)
<dael> github: https://github.com//issues/839
<dael> fantasai: This is about emphasis marks that are the dots put over the character. In general they're not on top of punctuation or spaces, jsut characters. When we drafted the css3 text for this koji and I asked what characters to skip. At that time Japanese task force said usually skip punctuation but they might want to so you should put markup to skip.
<dael> fantasai: That seemed to be their position and that's what we spec and then in L4 we added a property to control on punctuation or not etc.
<dael> fantasai: We got a comment from someone as to why the dots are on the punct. That re-opened the topic. i18n said we should do the right thing by default and a control to allow other things.
<dael> fantasai: Does the group want us to change the behavior to only put emphasis on not-punctuation? Or keep the current behavior?
<Chris> it sounds like the right thing to do, and I guess unicode character classes help there
<dael> florian: If there's no compat contraints doing the right thing for default is better
<dael> many: I agree
<dael> Chris: Unicode character classes should make this fairly tractable
<fantasai> ^fantasai: Not skipping punctuation by default means authors have to do weird things with markup to get the right effect
<dael> florian: Some punct and symbols might be mixed up but mostly yes.
<dael> myles: Do you have specific text as to how to tell where they shoudl and should not go?
<dael> fantasai: Looking at the reference.
<fantasai> https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/#text-emphasis-skip
<dael> fantasai: It's here^
<dael> fantasai: Basically we'd propose to change th initial value to spaces and punctuation.
<dael> astearns: And change the default behavior to be that setting.
<dael> astearns: Is text-emphasis-skip impl?
<dael> fantasai: No but if you don't impl you have to do the initial value. So we prt the behavior to L3
<dael> myles: Is there a reason this should inheret spec from text emstyle?
<dael> fantasai: Yes because you don't want to reset what should skip.
<dael> myles: Isn't skipping document wide?
<dael> fantasai: Did I mix it up?
<dael> myles: No, no, you're right.
<dael> fantasai: Kinda similar to why text underline position doesn't get reset by text decoration
<dael> myles: right. okay
<dael> astearns: Given we have at least one complaint about current behavior and i18n okay to change it seems reasonable to me to move i t into the current level of the spec.
<dael> astearns: Objections to changing the default behavrio for emphasis marks in the current level o f text decoration spec?
<dael> RESOLVED: change the default behavior for emphasis marks in the current level of text decoration spec
<dael> fantasai: I'll edit that in and we can cycle backto republish next week.

[xfq]

The initial value of text-emphasis-skip needs adjusting too.