971278 - Inconsistent behavior of ::first-letter

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 597510

(Core :: CSS Parsing and Computation, defect)

Description

[Crabique]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20140127194636

Steps to reproduce:

JS fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/YQk9J/10/
Tried to change properties of the first letter of a sentence, which happened to be the "+" (PLUS symbol).


Actual results:

It just didn't work whatsoever, as if FF didn't support the pseudo-attribute. Putting a +, - or $ character along valid text boundaries markers makes it completely ignore the whole thing.


Expected results:

Every other browser I tested it with (latest chrome, latest opera, very old opera 12, latest IE, hell even opera mini) did just fine, correctly changed properties for those symbols.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

The spec says:

  Punctuation (i.e, characters defined in Unicode [UNICODE] in the "open" (Ps), "close" 
  (Pe), "initial" (Pi). "final" (Pf) and "other" (Po) punctuation classes), that precedes
  or follows the first letter should be included

and

  The ':first-letter' also applies if the first letter is in fact a digit, e.g., the "6"
  in "67 million dollars is a lot of money." 

But '+' is not a letter, not a digit, and not in the above punctuation classes as far as I can tell.  So, as far as I can tell, per spec :first-letter should not be applying to it.  Same for '$'.

Comment 2

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

So plus (U+002B) is in class Sm (Symbol, math; see Table 4-9 in Unicode 6.2).


(In reply to Boris Zbarsky [:bz] from comment #1)
>   The ':first-letter' also applies if the first letter is in fact a digit,
> e.g., the "6"
>   in "67 million dollars is a lot of money." 

This wording doesn't say the it doesn't apply in other case, though.

I remember discussions of this issue in the past; I don't remember conclusions.

See, for example, http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2010Aug/0063.html .