[whatwg] Remove maxWidth from fillText and strokeText

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 12 May 2011, Charles Pritchard wrote:
> >
> > Their intent is to ensure that when you have a specific amount of 
> > space in which text has to fit, and you don't know exactly what that 
> > space is or you don't know exactly what the text is, you can easily 
> > work around minor cases of limited space. For example, I use it on the 
> > issues chart:
> 
> There's no guarantee of legibility

There's never any guarantee of anything. However, within reason this can 
maintain legibility.


> there's no exposure as to the actual size of the font being used.

Indeed typically the text would be squeezed, not made smaler.


> It's not (or was not, in the recent past) implemented in many browsers.

IE9, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox all seem to implement it.


> It serves only minor cases. It's unnecessary.

It serves pretty much every time you want to put text on a label and are 
pretty sure it'll fit, but it might go slightly over.


> Yes, you can use TextMetrics. So why have this added bloat?

Convenience. This is a trivial cost for significant convenience.


> Most of your philosophy regarding the Canvas API has been to keep out 
> unnecessary and unimplemented items. I don't see how this one is any 
> different.

It changes multiple lines of code which most authors wouldn't write into 
an additional trivial argument that greatly improves the UI. I think 
that's a pretty good deal.


> If it were intended, to be more useful, I'd want to see it in 
> measureText as well, so that measureText('string', maxWidth) would 
> return a font size attribute.

We'll be improving measureText's metrics in due course.


> Your use case, in your data chart, could quite easily have been written 
> up without the added attribute. That's why I'm bringing this up.

It could have been done, but I probably wouldn't have bothered if it 
wasn't an extra argument.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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