Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-fonts] Don't require browsers to always match every generic font family to a concrete font family (#4442)

@svgeesus wrote:

> My mental model is that the font stack consists of the following items, in order
> 
>  1. Whatever real font families have been specified
> 
>  2. Whatever generic family has been specified, if there is one
> 
>  3. Some sort of unspecified and implementation-specific fallback font, which may be composite, and is going for widest codepoint coverage. Details of this are not exposed in CSS (but the point about **first available font** and metrics makes me wonder
> 
>  4. Often, and unspecified and implementation-specific last-resort fallback. This may be a special font (like the one with the hex code as the glyph) or just a font with a missing-glyph.
> 
> 
> Thus, I would not have expected any font(s0 specified after the first generic family to be used. I wouldn't have expected them to cause an error, just that they would not be used.

FWIW, I don't think I agree with this model. If the author specifies intermingled real font families and generic families in the `font-family` list, we try each of them in the order listed, regardless of which kind of family name they are.

So it's entirely legitimate (although rarely useful, I expect) to say something like

    font-family: serif, "My Serif Font", sans-serif;

and the expectation is that we'll first try whatever font (or set of fonts) the UA provides for `serif`; but if a character is not available in that (those) font(s), we next try the specifically-named "My Serif Font" (perhaps it's a webfont that provides rare characters, but we don't want to download it at all if the `serif` generic has adequate coverage); and if that also fails, try the UA's `sans-serif` as well.


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Received on Wednesday, 4 December 2019 13:21:21 UTC