Intent to implement: CSS text-justify property

[Jeremy Chen]

Summary: This property selects the justification method used when a line’s
alignment is set to justify
<https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#valdef-text-align-justify>, i.e.,
text-align: justify.

Bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276079

Link to standard: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#text-justify-property

Platform coverage: All platforms

Estimated or target release: Firefox 54

Preference behind which this will be implemented:
layout.css.text-justify.enabled

DevTools bug: It's not yet clear to me whether specific DevTools work will
be needed.

Do other browser engines implement this?
Currently, the values specified by spec. are

auto | none | inter-word | inter-character

plus distribute as a legacy alias for inter-character.

*IE & Edge*
Support inter-word, but not inter-character or none.

*Blink*
inter-word and distribute values are supported behind the "Experimental
platform features" flag.
Bug: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=248894

*WebKit*
According to caniuse <http://caniuse.com/#search=text-justify>, WebKit
doesn't support any of these values yet.
Bug: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=99945

Tests - URLs / paths to tests (preferably web-platform-tests)
Not yet written.
There's a css-text-3
<https://github.com/w3c/csswg-test/tree/master/css-text-3> folder in W3C
CSS Test Suite which has some text-justify tests already.
If those tests are not sufficient, I might add some more to the folder.


Jeremy Chen
Software Engineer, Mozilla Corporation
jerem...@mozilla.com

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 2/8/17 5:08 AM, Jeremy Chen wrote:
> Link to standard: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#text-justify-property

How stable is this spec?

Note that even if it's unstable that shouldn't stop us implementing;
that mostly affects shipping. So as long as we're pretty sure that the
basic set of functionality is stable, even if the actual names of the
values are not, implementing makes sense.

-Boris

[Kan-Ru Chen]

After having seen many intent to implement mails raised this question, I
copied above sentences to the email template suggestions (thanks,
Boris).

Kanru

[Jeremy Chen]

CSS Text Module Level 3 is listed as an upcoming CR in [1].
IIRC, the wiki page [1] was updated at (or right after) a meeting in
MozHawaii.


[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CSS#Upcoming_CRs

-Jeremy

> _______________________________________________
> dev-platform mailing list
> dev-pl...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
>

[Patrick Brosset]

>
> DevTools bug: It's not yet clear to me whether specific DevTools work will
> be needed.
>

I don't think we need anything now, the property should work in the
inspector's Rules panel just like other properties.
Although we might want to keep that in mind for a future version of our
Fonts panel. We have plans to make it be a lot more useful to people. There
are many text and font related CSS features, and this panel could help
surface some of them, and help with user adoption.

Patrick

On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 7:21 AM, Jeremy Chen <jerem...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> CSS Text Module Level 3 is listed as an upcoming CR in [1].
> IIRC, the wiki page [1] was updated at (or right after) a meeting in
> MozHawaii.
>
>
> [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/CSS#Upcoming_CRs
>
> -Jeremy
>
> 2017-02-09 0:28 GMT+08:00 Boris Zbarsky <bzba...@mit.edu>:
>

[Xidorn Quan]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2017, at 12:33 AM, Patrick Brosset wrote:
> >
> > DevTools bug: It's not yet clear to me whether specific DevTools work will
> > be needed.
> >
>

> I don't think we need anything now, the property should work in the
> inspector's Rules panel just like other properties.
> Although we might want to keep that in mind for a future version of our
> Fonts panel. We have plans to make it be a lot more useful to people.
> There
> are many text and font related CSS features, and this panel could help
> surface some of them, and help with user adoption.

One potential feature for devtools is to show the justification
opportunities in a piece of text... but well, it doesn't seem to be
something very useful as people can easily explore that with a simple
web page themselves.

- Xidorn

[fantasai]

Not especially unstable, but IIRC there's a number of outstanding edits,
which is the main thing holding up the updates to /TR. The spec was
previously in Last Call, so expected changes are mainly bugfixes.

Open issues relevant to text-justify:
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/853
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/issues-lc-2013#issue-116
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/issues-lc-2013#issue-117
(I vaguely recall this being resolved, but it's clearly not updated)

~fantasai

[Tantek Çelik]

On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 11:31 AM, fantasai <fantasa...@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> On 02/08/2017 11:28 AM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>>
>> On 2/8/17 5:08 AM, Jeremy Chen wrote:
>>>
>>> Link to standard:
>>> https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#text-justify-property
>>
>>
>> How stable is this spec?
>>
>> Note that even if it's unstable that shouldn't stop us implementing; that
>> mostly affects shipping. So as long as we're pretty
>> sure that the basic set of functionality is stable, even if the actual
>> names of the values are not, implementing makes sense.
>
>
> Not especially unstable, but IIRC there's a number of outstanding edits,

So we should wait for those edits before implementing right? So that
we don't implement an out-of-date editor's draft?

> which is the main thing holding up the updates to /TR. The spec was
> previously in Last Call, so expected changes are mainly bugfixes.

Are these bugfixes severe enough to wait on implementing, or should we
implement in parallel while waiting for the edits?

> Open issues relevant to text-justify:
> https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/853
> https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/issues-lc-2013#issue-116
> https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/issues-lc-2013#issue-117
> (I vaguely recall this being resolved, but it's clearly not updated)
>
> ~fantasai

Thanks,

Tantek