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Same behavior or alias for text-justify: inter-character and text-justify: distribute #6156
Description
A few years ago, we decided to have two names for one behavior for the text-justify property: one because we though it was a good name (inter-character) and one as a deprecated value because it was implemented already even if we didn't particularly like it (distribute).
Currently, we're defining these two as just having the same behavior. Maybe that's fine. Or maybe one should compute to the other so that they get merged when you're observing things in the OM.
It appears that Firefox does compute distribute to inter-character (and other than Edge, it's the only current implementation of the property).
I propose we specify, as Firefox does, that distribute computes to inter-character.
Activity
css-meeting-bot commentedon Apr 8, 2021
The CSS Working Group just discussed
Same behavior or alias for text-justify: inter-character and text-justify: distribute, and agreed to the following:RESOLVED: update spec to alias at compute timeThe full IRC log of that discussion
<Rossen_> Topic: Same behavior or alias for text-justify: inter-character and text-justify: distribute<Rossen_> github: https://github.com//issues/6156
<dlibby_> florian: in CSS text, we say that text-justify: inter-character has an old name of distribute and has same behavior. should these be aliases, conceptually this makes sense and is what implemetnations do
<Rossen_> q?
<dlibby_> florian: Firefox implements as an alias where distribute serializes to inter-character
<dlibby_> fantasai: distribute was implemented in IE5, aliasing in Firefox demonstrates web compatibility, maybe we should go with that behavior
<dlibby_> florian: not 100% clear if aliased at parse time or computed value time, but it's being converted
<fantasai> s/IE5/IE5.5 (IIRC)/
<fantasai> s/aliasing/computing/
<dlibby_> emilio: we do it at computed value time, but wonder if we should do at parse time
<dlibby_> florian: compute time is easier to spec, parse time make sense
<dlibby_> emilio: we alias a lot of properties at parse time
<dlibby_> florian: for values, i'm not sure if it is well specified what it means for a parse-time aliasing
<dlibby_> emilio: the only difference is when querying specified style
<dlibby_> florian: we can spec Firefox behavior, or we can change to spec to desired behavior
<dlibby_> emilio: given that we have a lot of parse-time aliasing, maybe better to go in that direction
<dlibby_> fantasai: parse-time aliasing is not actually spec'd so we should figure out which direction to go
<fantasai> s/which direction to/where that would/
<dlibby_> emilio: [provides example of linear-gradient and -moz-linear-gradient]
<dlibby_> Rossen_: this is a good precedent to clean up and specify
<dlibby_> fantasai: suggest that existing impl computes, we should update spec to match impl. Separately we should define how aliasing works
<dlibby_> fantasai: at that point, if Gecko wants to change the text spec to use the alias definition, we can do that in a separate step
<dlibby_> emilio: sounds good to me
<dlibby_> florian: we should not leave the spec as-is, either spec what is happening today or what we want in the future
<dlibby_> florian: proposed resolution - update spec to match Gecko implementation
<dlibby_> RESOLVED: update spec to alias at compute time
See official minutes.
emilio commentedon Apr 8, 2021
I filed #6193 about specifying aliases at parse-time.
[css-text-3] ''distribute'' computes to ''inter-character''
Add test for compat value of text-justify
Bug 1807883 [wpt PR 37692] - Add test for compat value of text-justif…
Bug 1807883 [wpt PR 37692] - Add test for compat value of text-justif…
Bug 1807883 [wpt PR 37692] - Add test for compat value of text-justif…