Subject: [IPP] Fwd: W3C Supporting CSS for typographic information

From: Ira McDonald <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 May 2015 11:57:49 -0400

Hi,

Mike, Smith, and others interested in specs for best practice use
of Unicode in various scripts - an interesting note from W3C I18N
mailing list.

Cheers,
- Ira

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Ishida <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, May 14, 2015 at 11:39 AM
Subject: Supporting CSS for typographic information
To: www International <[email-masked]>, "fantasai (
[email-masked])" <[email-masked]>, Koji Ishii <
[email-masked]>, Ivan Herman <[email-masked]>, Dave Cramer <
[email-masked]>

CSS WG (fantasai) asked whether the i18n WG could document information
about justification and other typographic info related to non-Latin scripts
so that CSS specs can point to it for the benefit of implementers, rather
than try to boil the typographic ocean in the CSS spec.

I chatted with her, and agreed that the CSS spec could point to
https://www.w3.org/International/wiki/Typography, from which we point to
information we know about, including:

1. requirements generated by W3C groups
2. spec references
3. tests
4. external pages

(That page is already providing support for work on digital publications.
Note, btw, that i shortened the URL for the page.)

Furthermore, I believe it would be advantageous to convert information in
external references to W3C documents for reasons including the following:

1. we could ensure that the information is available on a long-term basis
2. we can put the information out for review and adapt as needed

We are already doing this for some scripts, with our layout requirements
task forces, ie. Chinese, Japanese, Indic, Korean, and hopefully soon
Mongolian and Tibetan.

I recommend that any information we develop in-house be grouped into
documents by script (eg. Tibetan, Korean, Ethiopic, etc) rather than by
feature (eg. justification, emphasis, page layout, etc.). Partly this is
useful because it fits with our current approach vis a vis layout
requirements, and partly because features such as justification are often
interconnected with other features, such as line-breaking, hyphenation,
line-start indentation, etc, etc. and so it makes sense to describe all the
features together.

Bringing the information into W3C documents involves some extra work for
the WG. Ideally the documentation would be created by experts working in
task forces. We already have people working on Chinese, Korean, Indic, etc,
and we should encourage participation from others.  For example, we heard
this week from someone who is interested in writing up information about
Ethiopic. I also have some contacts who expressed interest in working on
Arabic-script information.

One major benefit of doing this work is that it directly affects the
usability of the Web in cultures around the world, and supports in a
practical way our 'Web for All' philosophy.  Another is that it involves in
the W3C people from countries and cultures around the world that have
typically not been well engaged by us in the past, as well as effectively
promoting awareness and relevance of the W3C around the world.

Comments?

ri

PS: if anyone reading this knows of authoritative and useful information
about typographic requirements for a given script, please send me a link,
so that i can consider adding to the wiki page above.
_______________________________________________
ipp mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www.pwg.org/mailman/listinfo/ipp