Intent to Remove: -webkit-hyphens

[Tony Chang]

Contact emails

to...@chromium.org

Spec

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#hyphens

Summary

I plan to remove our partial implementation of -webkit-hyphens.  Currently, blink implements 'none' and 'manual' values of -webkit-hyphens, but does not implement 'auto'.

Motivation

Only implementing part of the CSS property makes it hard to feature detect blink's support of this feature. [1]  There is some partial work done for implementing 'auto', but no one is currently working on this feature and it is adding code complexity[2] and bloat since we compile in a third party hyphenation library.

Compatibility Risk

The only visible change is that "-webkit-hyphens: none" will no longer work, but I suspect this is not used.  You would need to manually add ­ markers to your HTML and add this CSS value to not break at those places.

Support for this feature is almost complete, but I have been unable to find anyone interested in owning and maintaining the server components which provide the dictionaries.  We should remove the code until we can find someone willing to own and finish the feature.

tony

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=107111

[2] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=167122

[Eric Seidel]

Do other browsers implement hyphens: auto?

Assuming "no", then LGTM.

[Eric Seidel]

Actually, removing broken features is LGTM regardless. invalid CSS
selectors are ignored.

I could imagine code which did "element.style.webkitHyphens" breaking,
but that should be rare.

[Tony Chang]

Firefox 8+, IE 10+ and Safari 5.1+ support prefixed versions of the hyphens property.

[Ojan Vafai]

LGTM as well

[TAMURA, Kent]

LGTM3.

--
TAMURA Kent
Software Engineer, Google

[Eric Seidel]

So what I'm hearing you say is that we'll likely need/want this
feature at some point in the future, but w/o a working implementation,
and w/o a successful path forward (or even an owner) we should just
remove the dead code.

Is it correct to say that "-webkit-hyphens: auto" has never worked in
any version of Chrome?

[Tony Chang]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Eric Seidel <ese...@chromium.org> wrote:

So what I'm hearing you say is that we'll likely need/want this
feature at some point in the future, but w/o a working implementation,
and w/o a successful path forward (or even an owner) we should just
remove the dead code.

Yes.  When we find an owner, we can bring the code back from svn/git.

 

Is it correct to say that "-webkit-hyphens: auto" has never worked in
any version of Chrome?

Yes, that's right.

[Paul Irish]

This may be Chrome's most significant false-positive feature detect.. and it requires significant hacking around: https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/blob/master/feature-detects/css/hyphens.js

There is a lot of desire for Chrome to have this feature: https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=chrome%20hyphens&src=typd 

I believe it's our most requested CSS feature.

.. but the best thing we can do in the meantime is fix the false positive first and address a complete implementation later.

[Binyamin]

Still not implemented in Chrome, https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=47083

[rana.ae...@gmail.com]

I second Paul Irish's comment, we are an editorial site with a lot of traffic from chrome and it's such a hassle to have to hack around to support such a basic content feature. 

[Konstantin Nikitin]

Hi!

Is it possible for people outside @chromium.org to become an owner? Our team is interested in maintaince of this feature.

--
Konstantin Nikitin,
+7 903 0072726

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.

[Levi Weintraub]

Hi Konstantin,

Anyone can become an owner :) There are some guidelines here: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/owners-files

Orthogonally, ownership isn't necessary for maintaining features in Blink. You just need an owner willing to provide reviews.

[Rana Khalil]

Hey Levi,

I am also interested to contribute to @chromium.org, and I have no knowledge of the code base yet. Where do you advice me to begin from?

Thanks,

Rana

[Levi Weintraub]

Rana,

I'd start here: http://www.chromium.org/developers/contributing-code

I'd stress the communication part, especially if you're looking for a place to get started. The best place to find owners and contributors to chat with is probably in the #blink irc channel on Freenode.

[bank...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, July 25, 2013 at 5:52:46 PM UTC-5, Tony Chang wrote:

I have been unable to find anyone interested in owning and maintaining the server components which provide the dictionaries.

Stupid question: operating systems don't have hyphenation dictionaries? Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and other software that wants to hyphenate, must each bundle their own dictionaries?