3 ms·

But then you lose backwards compatibility and have no standard spec.

chrismorgan 3y ago
The compatibility hazard is negligible; hanging punctuation is the main one that can actually cause harm if misapplied, and conservative heuristics for enabling it are easily arrived at. You might be surprised at how little of browsers’ existing functionality in these areas is actually defined, or in progressive cases how much is defined as being up to the browser. When I mention things like Knuth-Plass: all current browsers use a greedy first-fit line-breaking algorithm, but IE actually had something better long ago in some situation (I forget), and until recently, the entire thing was simply undefined. Now, the default is declared to be UA-defined (text-wrap-style: auto) <https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-4/#text-wrap-style https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-4/#text-wrap-style> with the option to declare a preference for alternative modes like stable, balanced or pretty. Long before this, Firefox had a bug open about implementing Knuth-Plass or similar <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181>, and the only oppositions have been on technical implementation grounds, not that there’s anything wrong with the concept, which people generally agree is desirable. As regards heuristics, you can define the heuristics to use completely, or you can leave it to browsers with some suggestions, or you can leave it to browsers. There’s plenty of precedent for all three of these.
- epeus 3y ago
  The Microsoft trigger was `text-justify: newspaper` and intended for fully-justified narrow columns. I don't think it made it to Edge.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    I believe it made it to Spartan Edge but not the switch to Chromium Edge.
- gwern 3y ago
  > hanging punctuation is the main one that can actually cause harm if misapplied Yeah, it can screw with layout. We recently removed it because it had seemed harmless to have it enabled so Safari users could enjoy it and other browsers would just ignore it, but then we discovered it was screwing up the layout on the main page's lists (https://gwern.net/index https://gwern.net/index) and was not harmless after all. :(
layer8 3y ago
It’s not like CSS implementations have been particularly strong in maintaining backwards compatibility.

The compatibility hazard is negligible; hanging punctuation is the main one that can actually cause harm if misapplied, and conservative heuristics for enabling it are easily arrived at. You might be surprised at how little of browsers’ existing functionality in these areas is actually defined, or in progressive cases how much is defined as being up to the browser. When I mention things like Knuth-Plass: all current browsers use a greedy first-fit line-breaking algorithm, but IE actually had something better long ago in some situation (I forget), and until recently, the entire thing was simply undefined. Now, the default is declared to be UA-defined (text-wrap-style: auto) <https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-4/#text-wrap-style https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-4/#text-wrap-style> with the option to declare a preference for alternative modes like stable, balanced or pretty. Long before this, Firefox had a bug open about implementing Knuth-Plass or similar <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181>, and the only oppositions have been on technical implementation grounds, not that there’s anything wrong with the concept, which people generally agree is desirable. As regards heuristics, you can define the heuristics to use completely, or you can leave it to browsers with some suggestions, or you can leave it to browsers. There’s plenty of precedent for all three of these.

epeus 3y ago
The Microsoft trigger was `text-justify: newspaper` and intended for fully-justified narrow columns. I don't think it made it to Edge.
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  I believe it made it to Spartan Edge but not the switch to Chromium Edge.
gwern 3y ago
> hanging punctuation is the main one that can actually cause harm if misapplied Yeah, it can screw with layout. We recently removed it because it had seemed harmless to have it enabled so Safari users could enjoy it and other browsers would just ignore it, but then we discovered it was screwing up the layout on the main page's lists (https://gwern.net/index https://gwern.net/index) and was not harmless after all. :(

layer8 3y ago

It’s not like CSS implementations have been particularly strong in maintaining backwards compatibility.