- From: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 14:54:40 -0700
- To: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk>
- Cc: David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com>, Adam Twardoch <list.adam@twardoch.com>, www-style@w3.org
If there's flowed text, it will reflow with font changes, except for cases when the substitution is between (1) the "same" font in different formats with different names, or (2) that tiny minority of fonts that have been deliberately designed to mimic the metrics of another font. In the broader universe of fonts, these are not the norm at all. Metrically similar fonts do make up a significant chunk of system fonts, though. (Arial/Helvetica, Times/Times New Roman, Book Antiqua/Palatino, etc.). Regards, T On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 2:42 PM, Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk> wrote: > > > David Hyatt wrote: > >> I'm well aware that visual jumping could occur on poorly designed Web >> sites if the feature were to become wildly popular. > > I don't understand why you believe that this would occur (only or > primarily) in "poorly designed Web sites" : I would have thought > that exactly the opposite would be the case. A well-designed web > site (IMHO) adjusts its flow to accommodate widely varying font > sizes so as to allow each viewer of the site to adjust the font > size to best meet his or her needs; such a site would (I suggest) > also adjust well to the replacement of a default font by a web > font once the latter has loaded, but the reflow would be clearly > visible. A poorly designed web site, on the other hand, that > uses fixed width containers, may well avoid the reflow problem, > but at the expense of cropping and/or enforced horizontal scrolling > when the font dimensions cause the container to overflow. > > Philip TAYLOR > > -- "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." - Sir Winston Churchill
Received on Thursday, 7 May 2009 21:55:21 UTC