Re: Why doesn't 'font-weight: 100' work yet?

On 2007/08/22 12:17 (GMT-0400) Bert Bos apparently typed:

> It used to be that the font APIs on many operating systems weren't rich 
> enough to put more than two weights in one family. That's no longer the 
> case, but most browsers still don't seem to recognize any weights other 
> than 'normal' or 'bold'. Why is that?

At the common sizes web authors are wont to use, there aren't enough px in
each character box dot matrix to provide all the weights CSS seems to
indicate should be available. At 13px or less, we're lucky to see two that
are distinguishable and yet retain the distinctive characteristics of the
particular font family. So, since the common fonts don't have more than two,
it seems to have been virtually pointless to put forth the effort to support
more.

Just guessing: probably upwards of at least 20px or 24px nominal size would
be required to have 9 discrete weights in any particular font and retain the
distinctive characteristics of the family at each size.
-- 
"   It is impossible to rightly govern the world without
God and the Bible."                    George Washington

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/

Received on Wednesday, 22 August 2007 18:46:09 UTC