602459 - Ignore embedded whitespace between first-letter and punctuation

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

In bug 399941, I chose to take whitespace into account when determining whether there was punctuation preceding or following a first-letter.

This was probably the wrong decision: as pointed out in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2010Oct/0030.html, French typographical practice always puts a space between text and double angle quotation marks (guillemets).

Comment 1

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Attachment: Testcase

The testcase uses ASCII space, non-breaking space, and thin space (U+2009) between the text and the guillemets.

Comment 2

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-5, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Would this mean allowing line breaks inside the ::first-letter?  That seems dangerous.  (I'd also like to move first-letter handling to frame construction.)

Comment 3

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

I agree about line breaks, and the same goes for tab characters.

Comment 5

[Johannes Odland]

In Norwegian there is also whitespace between the punctuation and the first letter:

Example:
– Pettersen, ropte hun, – kom inn og få kaffe.

The spec should be updated to support non English languages.

https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5154

Comment 6

[Johannes Odland]

The CSS Working Group have discussed the issue and concluded:
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5154#issuecomment-667151573

Waiting for the editor's draft to be updated.

Comment 7

[Johannes Odland]

The editors draft has now been updated:

Punctuation (i.e, characters that belong to the Punctuation (P*) Unicode general category [UAX44]) that precedes or follows the first typographic letter unit and any intervening space separators (characters that belong to the Zs Unicode general category [UAX44]) must also be included in the ::first-letter pseudo-element.

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-pseudo-4/#first-letter-pseudo

Comment 8

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The bug assignee didn't login in Bugzilla in the last 7 months.
:jfkthame, could you have a look please?
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