[css-text] text-wrap: balance vs fragmentation

[fantasai]

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Dec/0235.html

[svgeesus]

See also #2528 and #1975

[nigelmegitt]

This was mentioned in w3c/ttwg#42 (minutes).

tl;dr:

WebVTT CR normatively references CSS Text Level 4 for a MUST requirement making text-wrap: balance; the default - in the absence of evidence of implementation or tests TTWG marked that feature as at risk, with the intention of adding it back in again in a future version.

[svgeesus]

@nigelmegitt implementation status in WebVTT implementations? Are they all browser hosted or are some hosted in other things (video players and other native apps, TVs etc)?

[nigelmegitt]

@svgeesus according to the WebVTT Implementation Report there is one polyfill (vtt.js) that implements it, and no browsers implement it natively.

pinging @gkatsev

[nigelmegitt]

See also #8640 (comment) in which I argue that text-wrap: balance based on line length alone is not an appropriate solution for breaking 2 or 3 line blocks of subtitle/caption text into lines: grammatical constructions need to be taken into account as well.