Re: font-specific feature handling

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 12:49 AM, John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:
> Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>
>>>> Otherwise, fantasai's alt-set idea seems like an interesting solution
>>>> to Daggett's objections.
>>>
>>> As much as I agree with John's aversion to code clutter, I do think
>>> that it's better to keep these things tied to specific fonts, one way
>>> or another. That said, I don't think John's solution would be the end
>>> of the world. We already have this problem in desktop apps like
>>> InDesign, which preserve these kinds of font-specific substitutions. I
>>> don't think it's had a big real-world impact yet. Maybe someday it
>>> will.
>>
>> Still a fundamentally different set of problems, though.  If InDesign
>> preserves the substitutions, it's merely an annoyance when you notice
>> that the new font you're using has weird substitutions.  In CSS, the
>> weird substitutions will often/nearly always occur in a fallback font
>> that the author *never sees*, and thus won't have an immediate clue that
>> there's a problem.
>
> Are you thinking of fallback within a given font list or in the system
> fallback case?  What are the "weird substitutions" here, the use of a
> different font or the use of strange variants?
>
> Put another way, in the example below is the "weird substitution" the use
> of fontB?  Or the use of a font chosen by the user-agent when all three
> fonts in the font list aren't available or don't contain a given character?
>
> body { font-family: fontA, fontB, fontC; }

Neither.  The "weird substitutions" I was referring to were the
algternate glyphs from particular stylesets in the font.  They qualify
as "weird" because they are different from the alternate glyphs in the
original font used.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 19 March 2010 13:57:59 UTC