w3c
[css-text-decor-4] Should the spec for `text-decoration-trim` suggest applying `auto` to Chinese & Japanese content by default?
Spec: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/#text-decoration-skip-inset-property
The spec says that the initial value of text-decoration-trim is zero, so no trimming happens by default.
I'm wondering, though, whether we should recommend that browsers apply text-decoration-trim: auto (e.g. via the default HTML stylesheet) to elements that are styled with decoration lines if the content language is Chinese or Japanese.
Here's a screenshot of a fragment from Japanese wikipedia, with the Firefox preference to "always underline links" enabled:
Note the two regions circled in red: the first of these contains four separate links, and the second contains three. But in each case, we see a single continuous underline, making it far from obvious to the user that there are multiple short links.
With a rule such as
a:lang(ja) { text-decoration-trim: auto; }
we'd get something like this instead:
This seems to me a significant improvement. Should we include some such recommendation as a note in the spec?
I'd be supportive of that proposal, or even of making auto the initial value if that's web compatible.
Yes, making auto the initial value is worth consideration, though obviously that's a more pervasive and hence perhaps riskier change than doing it only for CJK content.
(Aside: should that be CJ or CJK? Modern Korean is normally written with word spaces, but can also be written without them, so perhaps worth including here.)
JLReq TF: yes languages that do not have a space between words/phrases need this.
