Re: Web Fonts

Chris Lilley wrote:
> That would be a highly backwards-incompatible change!

How so?  Any existing CSS2.1-conformant font-family value would work in UAs that 
implement the new syntax, so no existing content would be broken.  Writing 
content that would fall back well in older UAs would also be easy due to the 
error handling rules in CSS.  For example:

   font-family: Times, serif;
   font-family: url(myfont), serif;

As far as I can tell, this change is about as backwards-compatible as one can 
get with a change -- all existing content still works in new UAs, and working 
with both old and new UAs is easy.

> And it would completely destroy the CSS1 font model.

I'm not sure what you mean by that, especially since I don't see any mention of 
the term "font model" in either CSS1 or CSS2.  Do you mean the font matching 
algorithm?  Or something else?

The more I think about hyatt's idea, the more I like it; I'm not seeing any 
particular drawbacks to it, other than the need to rerender the page when the 
font finishes loading.  But any proposal that starts the font load from the 
stylesheet has that problem, of course.

-Boris

Received on Thursday, 24 August 2006 15:57:59 UTC