Intent to Ship: CSS4 text-decoration-skip-spaces

[Chromestatus]

Contact emails

perry...@gmail.com

Specification

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/#text-decoration-skip-spaces-property

Summary

The text-decoration-skip-spaces CSS property controls whether text decoration lines (underlines, overlines, line-throughs, etc.) skip over whitespace characters. This allows authors to prevent decorations from being drawn under spaces, which is often more visually appealing.

Blink component

Blink>CSS

Web Feature ID

text-decoration

Motivation

Currently there is no web standard way to control whether text decorations (underlines, overlines, line-throughs) appear over whitespace characters. Authors commonly want to suppress the underline under leading/trailing spaces in inline elements, but CSS provides no mechanism for this. The `text-decoration-skip-spaces` property fills this gap, allowing precise control over decoration rendering around whitespace. This is useful for navigation menus, links, and any text where the decoration should visually attach only to non-space characters.

Initial public proposal

No information provided

TAG review

No information provided

TAG review status

Not applicable

Goals for experimentation

None

Risks

Interoperability and Compatibility

Minimal risks; this feature is purely additive.

Gecko: No signal

WebKit: No signal

Web developers: No signals

Other signals:

WebView application risks

Does this intent deprecate or change behavior of existing APIs, such that it has potentially high risk for Android WebView-based applications?

No information provided

Debuggability

No information provided

Will this feature be supported on all six Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, and Android WebView)?

Yes

Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?

Yes
https://wpt.fyi/results/css/css-text-decor?sha=249e1eb8e6&label=master&max-count=1&view=subtest&q=css%2Fcss-text-decor%2Ftext-decoration-skip-spaces

Flag name on about://flags

enable-experimental-web-platform-features

Finch feature name

CSSTextDecorationSkipSpaces

Rollout plan

Will ship enabled for all users

Requires code in //chrome?

False

Tracking bug

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40862777

Estimated milestones

Shipping on desktop	154
DevTrial on desktop	150
Shipping on Android	154
DevTrial on Android	150
Shipping on WebView	154

Anticipated spec changes

Open questions about a feature may be a source of future web compat or interop issues. Please list open issues (e.g. links to known github issues in the project for the feature specification) whose resolution may introduce web compat/interop risk (e.g., changing to naming or structure of the API in a non-backward-compatible way).

No information provided

Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status

https://chromestatus.com/feature/4832783806627840?gate=6279878547734528

Links to previous Intent discussions

Intent to Prototype: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/69d8f543.050a0220.1c79a0.1352.GAE%40google.com

This intent message was generated by Chrome Platform Status.

[Dan Clark]

We talked about this during the API Owners call today and something that came up was this Issue 6 in the spec: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/#issue-4229bfce

Is your plan to ship with 'none' as the default, or try 'end' to more closely align with the Firefox and Safari behavior noted in https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4653?

API Owners may be open to taking on some compatibility risk here if we think it'd mean shipping a better behavior, as long as we go into it with both eyes open and are ready to activate the kill-switch if there are issues.

And can you request signals on this from Gecko and Webkit? Are there developer signals we can point at to see that people need this feature?

Thanks,

Dan

[Daniel Clark]

A concrete first step would be to file engine standards positions per the instructions in https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/wide-review/#standards-positions to concretely ask Gecko and WebKit whether they plan to support this. In those threads you could ask that if they do plan to support this, whether they’d ship with ‘start end’ per the spec, or ‘end’ which is closer to their current behavior per https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4653, or something else.

 

If no one else has plans to ship this then I’m less concerned about diverging from what the spec has, so ‘none’ would be fine. We should then push to have the spec reflect reality rather than the other way round.

 

From: Perry <perry...@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 13, 2026 6:41 AM
To: blink-dev <blin...@chromium.org>
Cc: Daniel Clark <dan...@microsoft.com>; Chromestatus <ad...@cr-status.appspotmail.com>; Perry <perry...@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Intent to Ship: CSS4 text-decoration-skip-spaces

 

You don't often get email from perry...@gmail.com. Learn why this is important

Thanks Dan. 

 

My plan is to ship with 'none' as the default, because I think such compatibility is less risky, but it will lead to inconsistency with the specification.

It seems that Firefox and Safari do not support it so far. Maybe I missed something.

I'm not sure how to continue. Could you give me some advice? Thanks.

[Perry]

Thanks Dan. My plan is to ship with 'none' as the default, because I think such compatibility is less risky, but it will lead to inconsistency with the specification.

It seems that Firefox and Safari do not support it so far. Maybe I missed something.

I'm not sure how to continue. Could you give me some advice? Thanks.

在2026年8月13日星期四 UTC+8 00:19:19<dan...@microsoft.com> 写道：

[Perry]

Thanks Dan. 

My plan is to ship with 'none' as the default, because I think such compatibility is less risky, but it will lead to inconsistency with the specification.

It seems that Firefox and Safari do not support it so far. Maybe I missed something.

I'm not sure how to continue. Could you give me some advice? Thanks.

在2026年8月13日星期四 UTC+8 00:19:19<dan...@microsoft.com> 写道：

Shipping on desktop154 DevTrial on desktop150 Shipping on Android154 DevTrial on Android150 Shipping on WebView154

[Dan Clark]

(Re-sending since the theading got messed up, sorry for any double-send).

A concrete first step would be to file engine standards positions per the instructions in https://www.chromium.org/blink/launching-features/wide-review/#standards-positions to concretely ask Gecko and WebKit whether they plan to support this. In those threads you could ask that if they do plan to support this, whether they’d ship with ‘start end’ per the spec, or ‘end’ which is closer to their current behavior per https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4653, or something else. 

If no one else has plans to ship this then I’m less concerned about diverging from what the spec has, so ‘none’ would be fine. We should then push to have the spec reflect reality rather than the other way round.

[Chris Harrelson]

TL;DR please update to match the existing spec and file standards positions requests with the other implementations.

I researched the feature and think it should ship with the default of "start end" as specified in the spec. Current tests are here.

The compat risk is only for the beginning and end of lines. I think it's unlikely developers will dislike no longer underlining extra space at the beginning or end of some text. I also think this situation is uncommon in existing sites; developers have to go out of their way to cause extra spaces to appear next to a run of text. (Also note: the default does *not* skip spaces in the middle of text.)

I did notice that there don't seem to be any tests for the default (i.e. a test that doesn't set text-decoration-skip-spaces at all in the CSS), please add that.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/976d683a-1865-40a3-8880-e0f3147ca667n%40chromium.org.