Re: Comments on CSS3 Fonts module

On Sunday, Sep 15, 2002, at 15:47 Europe/Helsinki, Ian Hickson wrote:

>>   * Using the OS practice helps the user understand that a missing
>>     character is being represented, because the behavior is consistent
>>     with the behavior of other apps.
>>   * The OS text engine may do the fallback internally, which is likely
>>     to be more efficient than application-side fallback.
>
> You can't rely on the OS system, because it is almost certainly not 
> going
> to be a CSS-compliant system. However, I agree that an OS-specific
> fallback mechanism is preferred.

What is CSS-compliant depends on what gets specified in the Fonts 
module which is being discussed. :-)

It would likely be bad for the performance of the (hopefully upcoming) 
fixes for ATSUI-related Mozilla bugs (such as 121540 and 165878) if 
Mozilla wouldn't be allowed to just pass a list of fonts in the 
preferred fallback order (based on author CSS and user prefs) to ATSUI 
and had to implement different fallback rules on the application side.

So far, Mozilla's attempts to avoid ATSUI and to implement everything 
on the application side have lead to worse text rendering results than 
OmniWeb's approach to go with the OS services. (I mean the quality of 
text rendering within a part of a line of text having the same style 
attributes.)

>> Screenshot:
>> http://www.niksula.cs.hut.fi/~hsivonen/typography/last-resort.png
>
> That's insane. :-)

Insanely great, rather. :-)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@niksula.hut.fi
http://www.hut.fi/u/hsivonen/

Received on Sunday, 15 September 2002 10:11:10 UTC