[Bug 12154] b and strong are font-weight: bolder in implementations, not font-weight: bold

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12154

--- Comment #8 from Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3cbug@gmail.com> 2011-06-06 19:00:52 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #7)
> And some fonts don't support bold at all.  So?

All OS default fonts and all the traditional "web-safe" fonts support bold.  Do
they all support multiple levels of bold?  Verdana seems not to:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/family.aspx?FID=1

Brief poking also suggests Courier New doesn't, but Arial and Times New Roman
do.

> Just as a note, some fonts also don't have any kerning information, and some
> browsers don't support kerning.  Does that mean no browser should ever support
> it?

If one user sees kerning and another doesn't, the only difference is one is
seeing uglier text than the other.  Same with antialiasing.  If the author
intends bold text that's all the same weight and the user sees varying weight,
the user will get confused -- "Why is this button bolder?"  If the author
intends bold text that varies in weight and the user sees text that's all the
same weight, the user will miss the extra emphasis and could misunderstand the
page.  So these are really different.

Note, no one is saying browsers shouldn't support font-weight: bolder at all. 
I'm saying it shouldn't be the behavior of <b> and <strong>, because it's
currently poorly supported (which is okay for a rarely-used CSS feature but
less okay for extremely common formatting tags); it never used to behave that
way; and it's probably not what authors intended.  If it becomes
well-supported, that knocks out point one, but not two or three.

> It's the default behavior in at least Firefox 4 on Windows when DirectWrite is
> being used.

Then unless you've gotten a lot of bug reports, probably either behavior is
web-compatible enough.

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Received on Monday, 6 June 2011 19:00:56 UTC