Re: [css3-fonts] new editor's draft

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> Wouldn't it be better to simply require using MyFont1 and MyFont2 rather
> than having some special behavior in case you have several @font-face
> blocks using the same identifier?

The point is that implementing it this way makes the document and style
definition more portable, and is simply more practicable with existing
scenarios.

Version 2.0 of the Times New Roman font that shipped with Windows 95
included 654 glyphs that covered basic Latin, Greek and Cyrillic.
Version 5.0 of the Times New Roman font that ships with Windows Vista
includes 3380 glyphs that cover very extended Latin, Greek, Cyrillic
plus Hebrew, Arabic and a large number of additional characters. The
intermediate versions of Windows (Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP) shipped with
other versions that had an increasing glyph coverage. The free "core
font" downloads that are now often bundled with Linux distributions as
well as the versions shipped with Mac OS X also include different
character sets.

When writing a stylesheet for my multilingual web page that uses the
Times New Roman *typeface* (i.e. design), I will prefer that all the
multilingual characters used in my text come from the same design, but
this will only be true on Windows Vista. Times New Roman that comes with
Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.4 may not include some historic Cyrillic or
phonetic Latin glyphs — so in this case, I would want to revert to a
substitute font, for example a downloadable web font (or a different
local font).

In other words, there may be scenarios where the downloadable web font
should only kick in if the preferred local font cannot handle the
character set requested by the page. Or simply the web author may prefer
a backup local font to kick in only if the preferred local font cannot
handle the character set requested by the page.

"Static" font switching defined in the markup won't help here. This is
why a "cascading" @font-face series will make sense, implemented in the
way suggested by the current editor's draft.

Adam

-- 

Adam Twardoch
| Language Typography Unicode Fonts OpenType
| twardoch.com | silesian.com | fontlab.net

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or
insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.
(Hunter S. Thompson)

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 2009 16:43:13 UTC