Re: [css3-fonts] revised definition of font-family

John Daggett:

>    font-family: <font-family-list> | inherit;
>    <font-family-list> == [ <string> | <user-ident>+ ]#
> 
>  Here <user-ident>+ represents either a generic font family or an
>  unquoted font family name.

I believe this is a bit counter-intuitive. “user-ident” sounds as if it was completely user-definable, but the generic families are (almost) normal keywords. Therefore,

  font-family: <font-family-list> [ , <generic-family> ]? | inherit;

would make more sense to me, if it’s okay to restrict the use of generic family names to once at the end of the list.

>  Font family names that happen to be the same as a generic family
>  name must be quoted to prevent confusion with the keywords with the
>  same names.

  font-family: thesis serif, fantasy script;

should work just fine, but should this be actively discouraged (“should not”), too?

>  As with other user-defined identifiers, reserved keywords such as
>  'inherit', 'initial' or 'default' are not permitted within unquoted
>  font family names.

It’s a bit strange that the former example (where local keywords seem to be used) works fine, but global keywords must not occur:

  font-family: inherit the earth;

Partial strings are fine again:

  font-family: flourish initials;

>  For unquoted font family names, the computed value is the name
>  converted to a string by joining all the identifiers in the sequence
>  by single spaces.

Does this include generic families?