PSA: Removing legacy -webkit-line-clamp trailing anchor behavior

[Walter Korman]

Hello blink-dev,

We are removing legacy behavior where -webkit-line-clamp special-cased a trailing anchor, if any, to always be painted and hit-tested. Trailing anchors will now behave like any other content in the box. Ellipsification logic is otherwise unchanged.

In addition to causing implementation complexity for Blink, authors generally use this property to achieve multiline ellipsis and actively don't want the special trailing anchor behavior. An example display issue likely related to this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25502628/webkit-line-clamp-truncates-link-in-the-middle

More detail:

http://crbug.com/474343

https://codereview.chromium.org/1065783002

[Christian Biesinger]

I'd really be much happier if we did not fix this. Line clamp requires the deprecated flex box implementation (-webkit-box), and I'd much rather remove it than improve it.

-christian

[Christian Biesinger]

Ah, looking at the patch I see that this simplifies code outside of LayoutDeprecatedFlexbox. I withdraw my objection then.

[PhistucK]

And on the same note, implementing text-overflow-last (or whatever) that basically does multiple line ellipsis (à la -o-ellipsis-lastline) would be much preferred and this old property should just be deprecated and removed (once usage settles down).

☆PhistucK

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[Paul Irish]

On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 1:15 PM, PhistucK <phis...@gmail.com> wrote:

And on the same note, implementing text-overflow-last (or whatever) that basically does multiple line ellipsis (à la -o-ellipsis-lastline) would be much preferred

Just looked it up.…

text-overflow: -o-ellipsis-lastline;

Wow, that is really really good looking. Polyfill and explanation here.

There's a massive amount of JS out there slowing down pages to do this. 

It appears there's been discussion in CSS WG on this, most recently in 2013.

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Oct/0624.html

Has anything moved since then?

 

[PhistucK]

Forget about the massive amount of JavaScript, things are done server side with no accuracy (making the server render text in a certain size and cut according to the rendered dimensions is just wasteful or too much work), in a lot of cases. :(

This is such a good feature that is simply missing and full of inaccurate or nonstandard hacks at the moment...

If you could champion this, that would be great. :)

☆PhistucK