Re: Adding a font to the current stack (smarter fallbacks)

Unfortunately, I think it might degrade some pages, imagine I have
following markup & CSS:

<h1>Company Name <span>some kind of company tagline</span></h1>

h1 { font-family: FancyTitleTypeface, serif; }
h1 span { font-family: RegularTypeface; }

The company name displays in a large size with a fancy font that is
only legible at large sizes. The tagline displays at a smaller size
using a custom font with better legibility.

My understanding is that, at present, if the tagline font could not
loaded, it would fall back to the default browser font, which would
retain the legibility. However, if this was changed so it fell back to
the parent's font stack, the tagline would be displayed using the
illegible font. Unless there's something I've missed?

I notice the relevant section in the CSS3 Font spec[1] says...

    "The keywords ‘initial’ and ‘default’ are reserved for future use
and must also be quoted when used as font names."

...which suggests someone may have considered this problem, and
reserved these keywords as a potential way to address it, e.g.

font-family: LeagueGothicRegular, initial;

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#font-family-prop

On 11 January 2012 16:08, Matthew Wilcox <elvendil@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure it even needs a change of syntax or additional trigger. It just
> needs defining as what CSS ought to do when the current font stack has been
> exhausted - fall back to parent elements font stack. In other words, the
> default action could be inherit without breaking any existing sites (because
> the current default is to just flop over and use whatever the browser's got
> set as a default font, I think).
>

Received on Wednesday, 11 January 2012 17:03:28 UTC