[css-text-decor-4] Should the spec for `text-decoration-trim` suggest applying `auto` to Chinese & Japanese content by default?

[jfkthame]

Spec: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-decor-4/#text-decoration-skip-inset-property

The spec says that the initial value of text-decoration-trim is zero, so no trimming happens by default.

I'm wondering, though, whether we should recommend that browsers apply text-decoration-trim: auto (e.g. via the default HTML stylesheet) to elements that are styled with decoration lines if the content language is Chinese or Japanese.

Here's a screenshot of a fragment from Japanese wikipedia, with the Firefox preference to "always underline links" enabled:

Note the two regions circled in red: the first of these contains four separate links, and the second contains three. But in each case, we see a single continuous underline, making it far from obvious to the user that there are multiple short links.

With a rule such as

a:lang(ja) { text-decoration-trim: auto; }

we'd get something like this instead:

This seems to me a significant improvement. Should we include some such recommendation as a note in the spec?

[frivoal]

I'd be supportive of that proposal, or even of making auto the initial value if that's web compatible.

[jfkthame]

Yes, making auto the initial value is worth consideration, though obviously that's a more pervasive and hence perhaps riskier change than doing it only for CJK content.

(Aside: should that be CJ or CJK? Modern Korean is normally written with word spaces, but can also be written without them, so perhaps worth including here.)