Intent to ship *on pre-release channels* : vertical text support (CSS writing-mode and related properties)

[Jonathan Kew]

See [1] for additional background on this feature.

We are aiming to enable support for CSS writing-mode and related
features (i.e. vertical text support) in Gecko 39.[2]

This will be enabled behind an #ifndef RELEASE_BUILD condition, so that
for the time being, these features will be available by default in
developer builds, but not in the release version.

Once more key parts of CSS layout have been adapted to support vertical
mode, we'll remove the condition and enable writing-mode by default on
release as well as dev channels.[3]

cc'ing firefox-dev and dev-gaia lists, particularly to make people aware
that while we encourage experimentation with the new properties (please
test and file bugs!), you should not attempt to use them in front-end
code that will ship to release channels where writing-mode remains
disabled-by-default for now.

JK


[1]
https://www.mail-archive.com/dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org/msg12343.html
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1099032
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1138384

[Jonathan Kew]

Following up on the message quoted below (Intent to ship on pre-release
channels), we are now planning to ship support for CSS writing-mode,
text-orientation, and related logical-direction properties (things like
block-size and inline-size, margin-block-start, etc) enabled by default
on all channels.

The RELEASE_BUILD condition that has been keeping these features
disabled for release builds was removed in bug 1138384, which landed for
Gecko 41. So unless we have reason to revert this during the Aurora/Beta
period, we expect these features to ship in Firefox 41.

Relevant specifications:
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-writing-modes-3/
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-logical-props/

JK

[Robert O'Callahan]

So tables and flexbox will be fixed in 41 too?

Congratulations on nearing the end of such a long and difficult project!

Rob
--
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oioso
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[Jonathan Kew]

On 1/7/15 11:21, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
> So tables and flexbox will be fixed in 41 too?

Both of them are "largely working" in 41 at this point; I believe
they're usable for most common use-cases. For tables, the main
limitation is that <caption> is not yet placed correctly; that should
follow in 42 (or possibly 41 if we decide it's upliftable). dholbert
knows the status of flexbox better than I do.

JK

[Sebastian Zartner]

CSS Logical Properties Level 1 doesn't even in WD status yet. Therefore I
assume everything in there can still change fundamentally.
So are you sure logical properties should be shipped already? Could the
writing mode features perhaps be shipped independently from the logical
properties?

This is not valuing the status of the implementation, just a note about the
status of the logical properties spec.

Sebastian

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[Jonathan Kew]

On 1/7/15 13:06, Sebastian Zartner wrote:
> CSS Logical Properties Level 1 doesn't even in WD status yet. Therefore
> I assume everything in there can still change fundamentally.
> So are you sure logical properties should be shipped already? Could the
> writing mode features perhaps be shipped independently from the logical
> properties?

The writing-mode features are much less useful/usable without the
support of logical properties. E.g. the default HTML and UA stylesheets
require the use of logical properties to get reasonable rendering
behavior in vertical writing modes for many elements. Author stylesheets
and libraries that want to be usable with both horizontal and vertical
modes will similarly need to use the logical properties.

(Note that Blink, for example, has been shipping prefixed logical
properties along with its prefixed writing-mode implementation for some
time. I don't think shipping one without the other is really workable;
and given that prefixing is now out of fashion, and that the WG seems to
be happy with the properties in the current ED, I think it's appropriate
for us to move forward. I'd expect the browsers that are currently
shipping prefixed versions based on older naming ideas will migrate to
the currently-specified names when they unprefix their implementations.)

JK