- From: r12a via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 05 Mar 2020 18:42:54 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
I think we're mainly thinking along similar lines. > 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). I've been wondering the same thing, but i don't have a definitive answer. Anecdotally, however, my interests and work with the Unicode Editorial Committee lead to me, on a very regular basis, hunting down fonts for minority or archaic scripts. The almost universal pattern is that you find a webpage that allows you to download a Unicode font (or if you're lucky more than one) (or for non-Unicode fonts often a package including keyboard). They don't usually provide WOFF fonts, they just expect you to download the font to your system. But there are often only a couple or at most a small handful of viable fonts for many of these scripts (and that situation typically lasts for several years). I _imagine_ this has by now led to the build up of a (relatively speaking) fair amount of legacy content that will break unless the user opts out. Note also that people download these fonts for use with non-Web applications, too, such as Word, so that's another reason they download the font file to their computer. Note, btw, that Hanifi Rohingya is one of the scripts that is not supported by a system font per my tests above, and there are currently very few Hanifi Rohingya Unicode fonts. Although Rohingya text probably isn't tested for in the more general fingerprinting patterns, if you actually wanted to identify Rohingya people and targetted your fingerprinting specifically to that, then it sounds like it would be fairly easy. On the one hand, it's worth pushing for system fonts to cover this and other missing minority scripts, but on the other, it's not a great solution for the user if there's only one font available. So i think that actively encouraging a culture that provides webfonts is probably something we should try to do, as well as working on the technical side. -- GitHub Notification of comment by r12a Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/4497#issuecomment-595384398 using your GitHub account
Received on Thursday, 5 March 2020 18:42:56 UTC