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[css-break] Rename and/or reimagine widows and orphans #11286

@kizu

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@kizu

I am splitting this from the issue about renaming avoid-orphans: #11283

For context and arguments why we want to rename it, see the linked issue, but what I would like to discuss in this one is twofold:

  1. Do we want to rename the widows and orphans properties from the CSS Fragmentation Module?

    The exact names need to be bikeshed, but because both of these are about “bad breaks” (how Ellen Lupton names them in her “Thinking with Type”), we could name it by it. Or, we could go from the current behavior which “keeps the lines together”, and name it something like min-trailing-lines and min-leading-lines. Or something else!

  2. If so, do we want to create new properties with the same syntax, and deprecate the old ones, keeping them as aliases? Or is there something else we could improve with the properties, given we will not be bound by interoperability?

Given, the current support for these properties is very spotty, either could work out. I do not know the reason Firefox did not implement it yet, as well as why there are differences in what was implemented in Chrome and Safari (see https://quirksmode.org/css/css2/widows.html for test cases).

This could be a good opportunity to discuss these differences, why they're there, and if we could come up with a consensus that all browsers could agree on, so we could move forward.

Both avoiding short lines, and avoiding single leading or trailing lines in fragments are something I (and many other developers) wanted to have for a while (example: web-platform-tests/interop#520), so it would be great to get closer to it.


I did also write a blog post about this.

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