[css-text] Support Basic Elastic Tabstops

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
css
Domain
web-dev

Research direction

Start with the CSS Text Level 3 tab-size property and review the linked discussions from 2007, 2012, 2013, and 2014. The issue proposes an elastic keyword but does not identify files, tests, or an implementation path; done would require a resolved specification proposal and corresponding implementer agreement.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

css-text-4

The tab-size property, determining the width of preserved Horizontal Tabulator (U+0009) chars, currently accepts <number> | <length> as its value. I wish CSS also supported a keyword to implement a basic version of Elastic Tabstops, e.g. elastic, but without explicitly set tabstop positions. An elastic tabulator would advance a single space width (1ch), except when there is also a tabulator in the line above, when it advances as much as is needed to align with that.

A more complex proposal to specify fixed tabstops has been discussed briefly in the past on www-style by @NickGravgaard (inventor of Elastic Tabstops), @fantasai, @SimonSapin, @LiamQuin and myself without any apparent conclusion or result (except lack of implementer interest):

An earlier draft of this module has had tabstop support.

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Merged PRs (30d)
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