Same behavior or alias for text-justify: inter-character and text-justify: distribute

[frivoal]

A few years ago, we decided to have two names for one behavior for the text-justify property: one because we though it was a good name (inter-character) and one as a deprecated value because it was implemented already even if we didn't particularly like it (distribute).

Currently, we're defining these two as just having the same behavior. Maybe that's fine. Or maybe one should compute to the other so that they get merged when you're observing things in the OM.

It appears that Firefox does compute distribute to inter-character (and other than Edge, it's the only current implementation of the property).

I propose we specify, as Firefox does, that distribute computes to inter-character.

[css-meeting-bot]

The CSS Working Group just discussed Same behavior or alias for text-justify: inter-character and text-justify: distribute, and agreed to the following:

• RESOLVED: update spec to alias at compute time

The full IRC log of that discussion

Topic: Same behavior or alias for text-justify: inter-character and text-justify: distribute
github: https://github.com//issues/6156
florian: in CSS text, we say that text-justify: inter-character has an old name of distribute and has same behavior. should these be aliases, conceptually this makes sense and is what implemetnations do
q?
florian: Firefox implements as an alias where distribute serializes to inter-character
fantasai: distribute was implemented in IE5, aliasing in Firefox demonstrates web compatibility, maybe we should go with that behavior
florian: not 100% clear if aliased at parse time or computed value time, but it's being converted
s/IE5/IE5.5 (IIRC)/
s/aliasing/computing/
emilio: we do it at computed value time, but wonder if we should do at parse time
florian: compute time is easier to spec, parse time make sense
emilio: we alias a lot of properties at parse time
florian: for values, i'm not sure if it is well specified what it means for a parse-time aliasing
emilio: the only difference is when querying specified style
florian: we can spec Firefox behavior, or we can change to spec to desired behavior
emilio: given that we have a lot of parse-time aliasing, maybe better to go in that direction
fantasai: parse-time aliasing is not actually spec'd so we should figure out which direction to go
s/which direction to/where that would/
emilio: [provides example of linear-gradient and -moz-linear-gradient]
Rossen_: this is a good precedent to clean up and specify
fantasai: suggest that existing impl computes, we should update spec to match impl. Separately we should define how aliasing works
fantasai: at that point, if Gecko wants to change the text spec to use the alias definition, we can do that in a separate step
emilio: sounds good to me
florian: we should not leave the spec as-is, either spec what is happening today or what we want in the future
florian: proposed resolution - update spec to match Gecko implementation
RESOLVED: update spec to alias at compute time

See official minutes.

[emilio]

I filed #6193 about specifying aliases at parse-time.