Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-fonts] system-ui-serif, system-ui-monospaced, and system-ui-rounded (#4107)

@jensimmons Thanks for the explanation.

> I feel like a lot of this discussion has been derailed by people who are mad at Apple for not making their fonts more "open".

Apple has at some point during this conversation stated the main reason for wanting this is that designers told them these fonts were pretty and they wanted to use them. That's what brought the "if so, just give them access to the fonts". I don't think anybody was particularly mad at anyone.

Based on the rest of your comment, we can discard that line of reasoning, regardless of how we ended up there.

For the purpose of matching the design of the OS, I am still a bit skeptical, not of the intent, but of how well it is achieved by this: authors will not only need a keyword to match the fonts that are used in native apps, but also to match the platform conventions about where and how these fonts are used. And these conventions are OS specific, the resulting layout will be odd on different OSes than the one the author had in mind when designing the page/app. Given that these fonts are fairly generic, and that the current design trends are fairly flat / minimalist, then it may not be too jarring now. But if you comparing very different OS styles, the problem becomes more apparent: if an app is used with these fonts to look native on iOS, it probably would look alright on android, but it absolutely would not look native on [enlightenment](https://www.enlightenment.org/_media/edi-screen1.jpg), [windows XP](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/47/Windows_XP_Royale.png/350px-Windows_XP_Royale.png), [WebOS on LG TVs](https://assets.hardwarezone.com/img/2016/10/LG-G6-line-UI.jpg) or [nextSTEP](https://news.mynavi.jp/article/20120628-nextstep/images/002.jpg), regardless of how you mapped the fonts: matching the look and feel of various OSes goes way beyond picking the right fonts. And giving that we don't have tools for that, I am concerned that this will result in making it easier for Authors to ship apps that look like iOS on all iOS browsers (of which there aren't very many), and like iOS-modulo-fonts everywhere else.

Now, maybe authors are going to do that anyway, so we should still ease that pain. But that's not the same as enabling portable apps that look native on any platform.

> Actually more thinking is needed here because of SF Rounded... maybe a system-ui-alternative is in order

That seems to play into my concern: `system-ui-alternative` feels like `fantasy` generic family: if you don't know what you're going to get, there's not way to use this correctly. And if you build your design based on the assumption that you'll get apples rounded fonts because iphone, then who knows what it's going to do on other systems.

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Received on Friday, 6 September 2019 07:20:30 UTC