[!IMPORTANT]
This wiki page is a recording of ideas under the presumption that CSS should, in the future, be easy and pleasant to author when working primarily in flow-relative coordinates.
The CSSWG has yet to adopt this principle. We hope it will.
Use Cases
Logical-first authoring is important for the following use cases:
Multilingual websites
Automatic translation of web pages
Component libraries that might be used in a variety of written language contexts
Accommodating reading preferences (horizontal vs vertical writing, which is already offered as a feature in the Japanese eBook market)
Goal
To make logical-first stylesheets easy and pleasant to author, we will ultimately need some kind of lexical switch. Relying solely on a per-property syntax, such as those proposed so far, would make logical mappings a second-class citizen to physical mappings.
Overall the proposal that seems to make the most sense is to provide an at-rule that switches the entire stylesheet file—or a designated block of it—to logical mode for every property that has both, and to also provide per-declaration syntaxes for targetted exceptions.
Note: A mode switch that is not lexically scoped would cause declarations written without knowledge of this style sheet to be re-interpreted in an unexpected coordinate mode. This is bad.
For example:
= [ logical | physical ] or [ relative | absolute ] or ...
@mode ; /* must come after @import and before any style rules */
@mode { }
selector {
property: value !;
}
For example, if a box has a margin to avoid drawing over part of a background image, this needs to be a physical margin even if the stylesheet is written in logical coordinates overall in order to accommodate translations.
## Plan
Realistically speaking, moving to this new world is a 7-10-year project:
1. Adopt per-declaration syntax switch, to be defined as valid on a property-by-property basis.
1. Make sure everything that can have logical/physical variants has both. (Years-long process.)
1. Adopt @rule for switching syntax at a higher level.
For compatibility reasons, we can't adopt an @rule until we've defined the impact of switching every declaration to logical mode.
## Phase One: Per-property Switch
If we're to adopt the plan of having a lexical switch, this presents several constraints on our choice of syntax:
- It has to be possible to apply to any property grammar, so that all properties have a consistent syntax for this switch.
- It has to be possible to be valid or invalid per property, so that properties that don't have their logical behavior defined yet cannot accept the notation.
- It might be nice if this syntax can also fit within a functional syntax, e.g. for gradients.
Using the `!keyword` proposal fits these requirements. Using a bare keyword does not.