[tei-council] Note on 2525586, "@scope attribute on <rendition/> for CSS pseudo-elements"

[David Sewell]

My "adopt-a-RED" note on this feature request follows.
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ID 2525586: @scope attribute on <rendition/> for CSS pseudo-elements
submitter: Brett Zamir

REFERENCE:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2525586&group_id=106328&atid=644065

BACKGROUND / RATIONALE:

Brett Zamir's SourceForge ticket sets forth clearly and concisely the
rationale for this proposal. Adding a @scope attribute to <rendition> would
achieve precisely the same thing that was achieved when pseudo-elements were
added to the CSS language. As the CSS 2.1 specifications note,
"Pseudo-elements create abstractions about the document tree beyond those
specified by the document language. For instance, document languages do not
offer mechanisms to access the first letter or first line of an element's
content. CSS pseudo-elements allow style sheet designers to refer to this
otherwise inaccessible information."
(http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#pseudo-elements)

RECOMMENDATION:

The feature request should be implemented.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES:

The elementSpec for <rendition> will additionally take <addDef ident="scope"> as
closed value list, with permitted values being "first-line", "first-letter",
"before", and "after". (These are all the CSS pseudo-elements defined in
current CSS as well as in the CSS 3 draft.)

DISCUSSION:

There is one potential problem with enabling this @scope attribute, which is
that apart from :first-letter, the pseudo-elements are perhaps more useful
for describing the rendition of original XML documents rather than encoded
texts. For example, the CSS rule

    p:first-line { text-transform: uppercase }

describes the intended appearance of *output text*, not of original text.
In a Web browser, as one resizes the window, the length of the first line
will change. Similarly, if one is transcribing the actual characters of a
text, one will generally not use :before and :after to generate output text.
(But the TEI elements for quotation are a clear case where @scope would be
useful, as Brett notes). If we are clear in the Guidelines about the
intended use of @scope, I don't think this is a fatal problem.

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
ROTUNDA, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 801079, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/