Re: CSS21 @font-face removal

On Monday, Oct 20, 2003, at 09:02 Europe/Helsinki, Tex Texin wrote:

> With respect to minority scripts, no - the fact that you can read it 
> does not
> mean automatically that your computer system comes with support for it.

If a person can read a minority script and has a system that could 
display the script, provided that the proper Unicode code points are 
used and a suitable font is installed, I think it is perfectly 
reasonable to expect the person to install such a font and choose a 
browser that can use the services provided by the system.

If the infrastructure isn't there, providing a dynamically downloadable 
font that is properly encoded from the Unicode point of view isn't 
going to help.

Then there's the practice of transferring Latin gibberish and applying 
a font that is a Latin font from the system's point of view but 
contains glyphs for another script. I think CSS 2.1 should not 
accommodate fontifying Latin gibberish to look like text in a minority 
script in browsers that happen to support such a trick. That approach 
may appear to work (for some value of "work") in some cases but causes 
problems with search engines and usually with browsers other than the 
one the author of the page was using.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://www.iki.fi/hsivonen/

Received on Monday, 20 October 2003 12:52:15 UTC