Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-fonts] limit local fonts to those selected by users in browser settings (or other browser chrome) (#4497)

> I'm not arguing against addressing the fingerprinting issue, i'm just saying please provide an easy opt out when people want to work with certain local fonts.

Clearly, there needs to be an opt-out of protection to address the needs of users whose scripts don't have a system-bundled font.

> Don't take the Safari route and make it impossible to use anything but what the system offers.

FWIW, I'm not aware of anyone advocating that kind of outcome for Firefox.

>> I believe the number of people is much smaller than it appears considering that the most popular systems already have even long-dead scripts covered.
>
> I think that's over-optimistic. So here's some data.

My point was that already the system-bundled font coverage is so broad that in fact egyptology isn't in the category of wholly-unsupported use cases. I.e. if it appeared that egyptologists would have to opt out of protection, it's not necessarily so, hence "smaller than it appears". (I'm not claiming that no one would need to opt out. It seems well established that there's existence proof of cases that would need an opt-out.)

> I'm also concerned, however, that your comment implies that as long as there is some font available, then that's fine.

There are different levels of adequacy. If there's no font at all, nothing works, and use cases like being able to input text into a global site (e.g. to write a tweet) can't rely on a Web font. However, when the text to be published is known, Web fonts can be relied upon for stylistic variability. Moreover, for user-installed fonts to satisfy stylistic variability, the authors need to know what fonts the users have, which doesn't scale well. For that reason, I don't think the notion that Web publishers want stylistic variability is an argument against (waivable) privacy protection by default.

> the repertoire for Egyptian hieroglyphs is expected to expand from time to time, is there a guarantee that available system fonts will promptly deliver changes?

Chances are that the outcome depends on how active the user community is with bug filing.

> does the system font you have in mind provide the coloured glyphs that egyptologists sometimes need, or the alternate styles they sometimes use?
> do those fonts support the new Unicode formatting characters for arranging egyptian glyphs in quadrats?

These seem to be things that can be addressed by Web fonts when publishing documents and that aren't total blockers for usage in the context of systems where the person providing the text doesn't control the fonts of the system that shows the text (e.g. Twitter).

> That is not helpful if you are writing in a Western Syriac language, or working with religious or archaic content that needs the Estrangela font

Do users of this language currently have that font installed such that Web authors are presently relying on it being installed?

(In general, with examples like this it's hard understand the severity. That is, I don't know how to map the example to a spectrum from rendering Italian with a fraktur font by default to rendering Polish with a French-typical acute accent angle.)

> I'm just trying to make the point that a one-size-fits-all font, like Noto, is likely to strip out important local cultural aspects of the text, 

To understand to what extent what's being proposed here would affect this, one would need to know to what extent sites currently rely on the user community having specific non-default fonts installed for expressing these cultural aspects (as opposed to using Web fonts). Considering how hard it is for the user to install fonts on Android, it seems unlikely that in parts of the world where Web access skews very heavily towards mobile devices Web authors could rely on user-installed fonts for this kind of cultural expression at present. That is, it seems that Web fonts are already needed for this level of control.

> and if it's the only game in town, can cause significant problems in languages where there are writing style variants, such as the 3 syriac varieties just mentioned, or looped vs unlooped Thai letters, or Naskh vs Nastaliq vs Kano vs Magrebi etc styles in Arabic, slanted vs upright vs rounded in Khmer and other scripts, etc.

There for sure are cases where limiting local fonts to system-bundled ones would restrict stylistic richness along those lines, but loopy vs. non-loopy Thai and Naskh vs. Nastaliq don't appear to be distinctions that limiting local fonts to the installed-by-default system fonts would break.

-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by hsivonen
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4497#issuecomment-594649481 using your GitHub account

Received on Wednesday, 4 March 2020 16:38:20 UTC