Re: alternate font properties

Chris Lilley wrote:
> Lets suppose I have an unusual font which has the family name of
> 'bold Palatino'. How would I write a declaration that asks for
> normal 14pt/14pt  with "Friz Quadrata" as the first family choice,
and
> "bold Palatino" as the second choice
> 
> H2 { font: normal 14pt/14pt "Friz Quadrata", "bold Palatino", serif }
> 
> 
> I have also seen font names with numbers etc in them. I am not sure
that
> your proposed syntax is unambiguous. Particularly for those vendors
who
> (attempt to) silently cope with missing quotes.

How is the problem of missing quotes exacerbated by the relative
position of the commas? Is

  H2 { bold Palatino, serif }

any less ambiguous? The size declaration is optional, so in the font
shorthand/property, missing quotes is a firm no-no.
 
> The idea of grouping font properties into atomic sets ic certainly
> interesting and has also been called for wrt ensuring that runs of
> text in a single language use a consistent font (especially languages
> which are mostly covered by Latin-1 but have a few extra characters).
> 
> I'm not sure that this particular syntax will fit the bill, however.
> Feel free to dissuade me with counter examples, of course.

This is a simple solution useful in simple situations, syntactically no
less intuitive than the shorthand, yet functionally a superset. Or,
more simply, all gain, no pain.

I have yet to see a negative example as I don't think the above
qualifies.

David Perrell