w3c / w3c/csswg-drafts

[css-text-3] Visible Control Characters Shipping Coordination

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Description

In https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/7249 we agreed to open a new issue to handle coordination for shipping the “make control characters visible” behavior specced in CSS Text L3, so opening this issue to track.

Where we left things back in May:

  • Blink just passes through to the current font, so whether the control code is visible depends on the font used to render it.
  • Gecko has implemented visible control chars behind a flag, which is on in Nightly builds.

Mozilla's position was:

emilio: I don't recall seeing issues with this in Nightly/Beta and we've had it for a long time
jfkthame: Also think we should ship it. Do occasionally see characters show up in Nightly that are invisible elsewhere, but it's rare.
jfkthame: And in all cases the users are better served by sites fixing their broken data

Tab asked @chrishtr to coordinate for Blink. smfr was unsure about WebKit's situation. See minutes.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading the related issue 7249 and the linked May 2022 minutes. Review the reported Blink, Gecko, and WebKit implementation status and the coordination request. Done means recording a clear cross-engine shipping status or decision for visible control characters.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
css
Domain
web-dev
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
15/100

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