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>The purpose of pretty, as designed by the CSS Working Group, is for each browser to do what it can to improve how text wraps. [...] There is no mandate for eve

>The purpose of pretty, as designed by the CSS Working Group, is for each browser to do what it can to improve how text wraps. [...] There is no mandate for every browser to make the same choices. In fact, a browser team might decide in 2025 to handle some aspects of improving these qualities, and then change what their implementation does in the future. [...] Because of the way Chrome’s implementation of pretty has been taught, a lot of web developers expect this value is only supposed to prevent short last lines. But that was never the intention. Why did they even design it like this in the first place? This seems like it is counter to much of what browsers have been doing recently like being able to customize select, the browser interop and baseline projects, web platform test etc. I would rather move away from these types of features in favor of more explicit ones. I understand that this isn't a serious issue and is unlikely to cause bugs compared to other interop issues which are true deviations from the spec. It just seems counterintuitive to do this though.

giraffe_lady 2y ago
They point to the reason in the intro but don't make it explicit: it's because this is at the intersection of computing with a much older tradition, typesetting. There's no "correct" way to typeset a document, there wouldn't even be a consensus among typesetters on what the implementation specifics look like. Rather than turn the spec committee into a decades-long ecumenical council of typographers they just left the specifics up to each individual "shop" as it always has been. Except now instead of printers it's the browser vendors needing to make the final call.
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  >There's no "correct" way to typeset a document They can add multiple typesetting properties and allow the develop to decide which one to use. Besides, letting each browser decide what the "best" line break looks like doesn't solve the problem of there not being a definitive answer to that question. Even here, I don't think the Chrome developers have a vastly different opinion on what a good line break looks like. It's possible they didn't like the performance implications of webkit's version or had some other tangential reason, although the blog says performance is not an issue.
  - giraffe_lady 2y ago
    ok. you should tell them.
- mrandish 2y ago
  > Rather than turn the spec committee into a decades-long ecumenical council of typographers... Having worked with passionate (aka opinionated) typographers, that phrasing earned a well-deserved chuckle. Leaving implementation choices up to each browser was certainly the only to way to get it into CSS. Hopefully various implementations will evolve over time and coalesce into a fairly consistent baseline.
moralestapia 2y ago
While this is valuable work, leaving it implementation-dependent is a terrible mistake. The whole point of CSS is/was to standardize presentation across browsers.
- alwillis 2y ago
  The whole point of CSS is/was to standardize presentation across browsers. CSS was created to standardize how to deal with presentation, but that doesn't mean every website should look exactly the same on every device or in every browser. The era of attempting to do that is over. text-wrap: pretty is a great example of progressive enhancement [1]: it's a great way to add some polish to a website but if the user's device doesn't support it, they can still access all of the content on the site and be none the wiser. If you read the CSS specifications, browser makers, in some cases, are allowed to use platform-specific heuristics to determine whether or not to execute certain features. Downloading web fonts works like this—browsers fallback to system fonts if a webfont doesn't download within 3 seconds. It makes sense that text-wrap: pretty should be one of those. If your smartphone is low on power and the signal isn't that great, you can forgo expertly wrapped text and elegant hyphenation in order to view the webpage as quickly as possible. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    >but that doesn't mean every website should look exactly the same on every device or in every browser That was the point. Maybe Gen Z changed its meaning now, but that was the main premise. There was even the Acid3 test and similar stuff.
  - fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
    >CSS was created to standardize how to deal with presentation, but that doesn't mean every website should look exactly the same on every device or in every browser. The era of attempting to do that is over. For every device I agree but that was never the goal of CSS. It is meant to respond to the device's constraints such as screen dimensions and device type (desktop, mobile, print) using eg. media queries. In every browser I do think they should try to accomplish the same thing. Even if the exact algorithms used are different, the intended result should be agreed upon.

giraffe_lady 2y ago

They point to the reason in the intro but don't make it explicit: it's because this is at the intersection of computing with a much older tradition, typesetting. There's no "correct" way to typeset a document, there wouldn't even be a consensus among typesetters on what the implementation specifics look like. Rather than turn the spec committee into a decades-long ecumenical council of typographers they just left the specifics up to each individual "shop" as it always has been. Except now instead of printers it's the browser vendors needing to make the final call.

fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
>There's no "correct" way to typeset a document They can add multiple typesetting properties and allow the develop to decide which one to use. Besides, letting each browser decide what the "best" line break looks like doesn't solve the problem of there not being a definitive answer to that question. Even here, I don't think the Chrome developers have a vastly different opinion on what a good line break looks like. It's possible they didn't like the performance implications of webkit's version or had some other tangential reason, although the blog says performance is not an issue.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  ok. you should tell them.
mrandish 2y ago
> Rather than turn the spec committee into a decades-long ecumenical council of typographers... Having worked with passionate (aka opinionated) typographers, that phrasing earned a well-deserved chuckle. Leaving implementation choices up to each browser was certainly the only to way to get it into CSS. Hopefully various implementations will evolve over time and coalesce into a fairly consistent baseline.

moralestapia 2y ago

While this is valuable work, leaving it implementation-dependent is a terrible mistake. The whole point of CSS is/was to standardize presentation across browsers.

alwillis 2y ago
The whole point of CSS is/was to standardize presentation across browsers. CSS was created to standardize how to deal with presentation, but that doesn't mean every website should look exactly the same on every device or in every browser. The era of attempting to do that is over. text-wrap: pretty is a great example of progressive enhancement [1]: it's a great way to add some polish to a website but if the user's device doesn't support it, they can still access all of the content on the site and be none the wiser. If you read the CSS specifications, browser makers, in some cases, are allowed to use platform-specific heuristics to determine whether or not to execute certain features. Downloading web fonts works like this—browsers fallback to system fonts if a webfont doesn't download within 3 seconds. It makes sense that text-wrap: pretty should be one of those. If your smartphone is low on power and the signal isn't that great, you can forgo expertly wrapped text and elegant hyphenation in order to view the webpage as quickly as possible. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement
- moralestapia 2y ago
  >but that doesn't mean every website should look exactly the same on every device or in every browser That was the point. Maybe Gen Z changed its meaning now, but that was the main premise. There was even the Acid3 test and similar stuff.
- fngjdflmdflg 2y ago
  >CSS was created to standardize how to deal with presentation, but that doesn't mean every website should look exactly the same on every device or in every browser. The era of attempting to do that is over. For every device I agree but that was never the goal of CSS. It is meant to respond to the device's constraints such as screen dimensions and device type (desktop, mobile, print) using eg. media queries. In every browser I do think they should try to accomplish the same thing. Even if the exact algorithms used are different, the intended result should be agreed upon.