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I want better french typography support #259

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aarongustafson opened this issue Jan 10, 2021 · 2 comments · Fixed by #329
Closed

I want better french typography support #259

aarongustafson opened this issue Jan 10, 2021 · 2 comments · Fixed by #329
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@bkardell
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want Incoming requests from the community

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@aarongustafson
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aarongustafson commented Jan 10, 2021 •
edited by bkardell
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Browsers localize automatically quotation marks if a lang attribute is provided which is great, but we can do much more to enhance and simplify experience of developers but also authors on the web.

In French, exclamation and question mark both require a non-breaking space before them, on the contrary of English. Often, people on the web use normal space which create orphan sign at the end of a new line.

Currently, developers aware of this problem solve it by:

  • Replacing space characters before ! and ! in text with   or \xa0
  • Using white-space: nowrap; CSS property and adding an HTML element encompassing the last word and the sign ! or ? of a sentence
  • Use no space

Some links to illustrate the issue:

HTML authoring in French
Whitespace before some punctuation characters in French: is there a CSS way to avoid lines breaking? - Stack Overflow
Space Yourself

https://webwewant.fyi/wants/5ffb01b21e3e3f6db4eb6404/
@aarongustafson aarongustafson added the want Incoming requests from the community label Jan 10, 2021
@aarongustafson aarongustafson self-assigned this Jan 10, 2021
@captainbrosset
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This seems to me like a fair request.
As the author of the want said, the following html code will produce different results if you change the value of the lang attribute:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="fr">
  <head>
     <meta charset="utf8">
  </head>
  <body>
    <q>this is a quote</q>
  </body>
</html>

With fr:
image

With en:
image

I don't know what authoring mechanism could be put in place for this, but something similar to generate correct sentence endings seems useful.

@javifernandez
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javifernandez commented Mar 16, 2021 •
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Hi,
@bkardell asked me to look at this issue, which I agree it's a fair request indeed.

As a matter of fact, what is requested might be the expected behavior for any lang using Unicode. The UAX14 spec states that the exclamation and question marks are defied as EX class, which specifically prohibit breaking before these characters.

EX | Exclamation/ Interrogation | “!”, “?”, etc. | Prohibit line breaks before

Additionally, the white-space character is defined as BA class (break-after), which prohibits breaking before the space.

@WebWeWant WebWeWant deleted a comment from github-actions bot Mar 23, 2021
@bkardell bkardell mentioned this issue Mar 30, 2021
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Create 5ffb01b21e3e3f6db4eb6404.md WebWeWant/webwewant.fyi
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@aarongustafson @bkardell @captainbrosset @javifernandez