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

I'm grateful for the conversation here, and encouraged the by the proposals above.  I want to suggest a slightly different approach, that (I hope) will maintain the following use cases:

1. Privacy preserving default (e.g. default should reflect the common case, that most users are well suited by OS + Web fonts)
2. Don't break websites for folks who are not well solved by OS defaults (e.g. folks visiting websites needing fonts not provided by their systems should be strictly no worse off than the current situation. ditto for web devs)
3. Avoid being tied to fragile / freeze-the-web list building
4. Not introduce new privacy harms (e.g. not require building caches that are shared between profiles / storage resets etc, as some proposals would require)
5. Provide an in-standard solution for vendors to differentiate over, but also share resources where possible.

If there are concerns or use cases not covered in the above, please let me know.  I'm mostly trying to generalize-w/o-loss over some of the concerns shared above.

My proposal is:

1. By default, sites only access OS-default fonts and web fonts
2. Vendors can also define, however they like, identify `(font, local, os)` tuples, for additional fonts the browser can load off disk iff they are on the disk (e.g. if they're not on the disk, the browser doesn't magically provide / load them).  I dont have a good name for these, so i'll just call them **vendor-local-fonts**. How vendors create these sets of vendor-local-fonts is up to the vendor, but I imagine this is a place that resources could be shared, and this working group / W3C could be very useful in maintaining a useful set.
3. Vendors implement profile-wide (not per site) settings UI that allows for
    i. a useful `default` setting (websites can access OS-provided fonts, web fonts, and **vendor-local-fonts**)
    ii. a `custom` setting, that shows users the fonts the browser knows about on disk that are not OS-provided fonts, and users can opt those in to the set of fonts sites can access

This is similar to the proposal in the issue text at the top of this thread, but provides a) a path for vendors to define better defaults for users per-local, b) still maintains the needed use cases, c) would require no changes for most users

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Received on Sunday, 8 March 2020 01:50:17 UTC