Like XSL:FO, CSS uses the terms start and end to distinguish the two logical inline-axis directions. Lacking any better proposals, we've been using XSL:FO's before/after to distinguish the two logical block-axis directions. People generally aren't thrilled with these terms: they are not distinct, and the two pairs are therefore confusable. But there haven't been any compelling alternatives… until now.
Rename the terms we are using for the two logical block-axis directions,, before/after, to make them more obvious and less confusable with the inline-axis start/end.
Christoph posted several suggestions, and the pair head/foot has gotten some traction.
'head' / 'foot' actually makes some sense to me, as it corresponds to
the directions of the header/footer in a document. That's
writing-mode dependent, and easy to explain. (Plus, it always makes
me strangely happy when keyword pairs are the same length.)
Remy:
I like head/foot, too.
I like head/foot as well. Unlike before/after, it's immediately obvious
which directions it corresponds to, and it's not confusable with start/end.
And given a pile of head/foot/start/end keywords, it makes it easy to map
all of them to directions: once head/foot is assigned, start/end are easy.
It doesn't have the confusion with :before/:after that Sylvain noted [1].
And as terminology in the specs it'll also avoid any confusion with DOM/
source order terms. It seems to work well as values for 'caption-side' and
'float', and 'margin-head'/'margin-foot' makes perfect sense as well.
The one problem we've had with fixing the confusion of before/after was
finding another pair that was clearly better. And I think this is *clearly*
better.
I'm in favor of switching over! We haven't released any CR specs with any
before/after syntax yet, so we still have the opportunity…
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012May/0071.html