RE: [css-fonts] font-language-override

Hi Jonathan,

On Wednesday, June 01, 2016 5:22 AM Jonathan Kew wrote:
> Changing the content language tag just to get the right shaping is not an adequate solution.
> For one thing, it requires changing the content HTML to achieve something that should be possible purely through styling.
>
> More significantly, it means you then have content with _incorrect_ tagging, which will break any other process (e.g. spell-checking, hyphenation, machine translation, text-to-speech, language-sensitive search and archiving, etc., etc.) that depends on having _correct_ lang tagging.

I agree it's a hack.

> We want to be able to have properly lang-tagged content, and render that content with appropriate shaping. 
> In the absence of an _exhaustive_ and universally-supported BCP47-to-OpenType mapping, or something like 
> that -- which would be a huge and difficult undertaking -- the font-language-override property allows authors 
> to produce the correct rendering without requiring them to corrupt their content to achieve it.

Having proper language-tagged content is good but if the stated goal of font-language-override is to mimic another language typographic behavior:
a) how a developer would know what the font-supported language tags are (without hacking it)?
b) how one can choose which OT language tag to use for an override if the target language doesn't have it mapped to one of the OT language tags? [and]
c) how do they know what the correct rendering should be (or more importantly) what the actual rendering results on a given platform for a given browser/font are?

Thank you,
Vlad

Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2016 11:05:24 UTC