[css-values] should ic unit use 永 instead of 水?

[heycam]

https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values-4/#ic

A minor issue, but I wonder if the ic unit should use the advance of the 永 glyph instead of 水? To me 永 feels like it's closer to the idea of a representative Chinese character.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Principles_of_Yong

But I'd be interested to know if there was a particular reason for choosing 水.

[frivoal]

Good point. I think switching is reasonable. In the vast majority of fonts, it should not make any difference, and 永 is indeed more iconic.

I think 水 was picked as a character that's common (so that it would be in every font) and that did not differ based on the language. 永 should fit that bill too.

[myakura]

Writing Modes uses 水 as well (used when scaling down the tate-chu-yoko to 1em). If switching to 永, I kinda want to see two specs refer to the same character.

[css-meeting-bot]

The Working Group just discussed ic unit character basis, and agreed to the following:

• RESOLVED: closing this issue as no-change

The full IRC log of that discussion

<fantasai> Topic: ic unit character basis
<fantasai> github: https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2798
<frremy> astearns: who want to take the IC unit issue?
<frremy> heycam: I don't think it's super important because IC isn't implemented yet
<frremy> florian: not in any browser, but maybe some epub/print impl
<frremy> heycam: the glyph should be chinese as I understand
<frremy> heycam: I propose the Yuan "eternity" character is more common than the one currently used
<frremy> heycam: so I proposed to switch to this instead of the "water" char
<frremy> fantasai: why not, but we also need to change writing mode
<frremy> fantasai: we just need to make sure it is always full-width, and common to all cjk fonts
<frremy> myles: how many fonts that support both of these chars support different advances for them?
<frremy> florian: that should be excessively rare
<frremy> myles: then I am fine with this
<frremy> ??: I don't think this will be a compat issue
<frremy> fantasai: I agree there should be no compat
<astearns> s/??/xidorn
<myles> s/then I am fine with this/I understand./
<frremy> fantasai: could be make one version of writing mode do one char, then the next one switch to the other?
<dbaron> the unicode codepoints for these characters differ by 4, fwiw :-)
<frremy> no
<frremy> heycam: I am fine leaving the char as is
<frremy> myles: is it gonna be likely to have a font that supports one vs the other?
<frremy> heycam: not if you dont artificially limit
<frremy> florian: for newspaper, you could have a few glyphs just for the name of the newspaper
<frremy> florian: but any font for a normal text would include both
<frremy> RESOLVED: closing this issue as no-change
<frremy> fantasai: (largely for process reason, changing writing-modes is too much pain)