- From: Addison Phillips via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 01 Apr 2020 18:12:47 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
Similar to the discussion of fingerprinting user-installed fonts, I'd be a little concerned about generic fonts requiring some sort of universal support as this pertains to non-Western publishing traditions. When a user names a generic font, they expect the browser will select *some* font and that this font will be at least somewhat consistent with the "generic" intention of the name. E.g. if I specify sans-serif, I'd be satisfied with Helvetica, Futura, Arial, or Franklin Gothic and seriously disappointed by Zapf Chancery. For non-Western publishing, the existing generic names are a little restrictive. Somewhere in this repo there is a discussion of whether `cursive` means fonts such as Kaiti in Chinese. And there are styles such as the rounded yuan style fonts that have no specific way to be generically selected. Similarly, Arabic script fonts have well-known styles that don't neatly map to serif/sans/etc. e.g. there are nastaliq, nashk, and ruqh styles. See for example [here](https://www.w3.org/TR/typography/#font_style) or the gap analysis document [here](https://w3c.github.io/alreq/gap-analysis/#font_style). Not every platform installs fonts for all of these scripts nor supports all of these typographic variations out of the box. They may be installed only on specific locale versions or (especially for minority languages) they might require custom installation. I tend to think that allowing for generic names that support different typographic and publishing traditions explicitly would be a worthy addition to CSS and the mooted second rule seems biased against that possibility. -- GitHub Notification of comment by aphillips Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4910#issuecomment-607409677 using your GitHub account
Received on Wednesday, 1 April 2020 18:12:51 UTC