Also I think letter-spacing would benefit greatly of multiplier unit. Instead of adding a fixed space, multiply the current space by it. Which keeps the intrinsic letter-spacing ratios.

Hi! Thanks for your comment.

I can’t give you an exact number on how many websites could break or at least look worse if letter-spacing is “fixed”, that is something that should be investigated if we want the “trimming” or “space around” solution to be implemented.

However, as noted on this CSSWG Group Issue: A Blink developer stated that “For Blink, the same as before; the breakage is beyond what we can accept”. And on the Gecko side, the breakage was more than expected. So there isn’t a definite conclusion.

If we don’t have any compact conclusion or “know the risk”, changing how browsers handle letter-spacing would be reckless. Especially since letter-spacing is used over 60% on the web.

Above all, I do understand the need to better compact data on the issue.

Thanks for reading!

Additionally, both negative (-1em) & larger letter spacing (10em) should be considered. You wouldn’t want a 10em gap between screen edges and the letters.

this (anti) solution brings compatibility risks that are simply too big to even consider; text measurement and line breaks would change, possibly causing breakage on lots of websites

In short, two of your main points being that such fix would:

affects “lots of websites”
and the risks are big

I’m not sure what “lot” means. We would need to find out how many websites are using letter-spacing, especially in a way that fixing this would actually break the site.

And for that we need to consider what “breaking the site” means. Because we are talking about something that should not (really) affect functionality, only how things look.

And then we can discuss what you mean by risks being big.

What exactly the risk?

Worst case, some UI could actually break. A header might overflow content below, cover an important link or button.

My guess is that this would be rare, compared to more harmless readability issues, like words or paragraphs being a bit more close to each other, than expected.

I understand that this is still not ideal, but it is also not ideal having to learn one more inconsistent and broken behaviour, and one more CSS property to work around it.

I like the sentiment of the web platform wanting to keep backwards compatibility, but we are already at a point where lots of websites are already broken, many things are not rendering as they was imagined, more serious breakages and changes has happened in the past.

Hi! According to the spec, it is equal to the space defined in the letter-spacing property and nothing else. The space around the “b”s should also be equal between them.

…should give an equal space between the two “b” letters:

Equal to what?