Re: [csswg-drafts] [meta] [css-fonts] Criteria for generic font families (#4910)

I wanted to illustrate some of the discussion around the need for font distinctions to ”distinguish some content from other content (semantics)”, as @r12a puts it. I know I've used the analogy of how Latin sometimes uses italics or obliques to represent an “alternate voice”, a semantic distinction that would be lost if everything fell back to the same font. Here are some illustrations of similar usages in non-Latin writing systems:

- http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/scans/ChinatownSFPL014.png
- http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/scans/ChinatownSFPL037.png
- http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/scans/LoC111.png
- http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/scans/Princeton%20East%20Asian%20Library%20-%20ISSN1228-3436%20002.png
- (compare to obliques, used in http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/scans/Princeton%20East%20Asian%20Library%20-%20ISSN1228-3436%20001.png )
- http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/scans/Princeton%20East%20Asian%20Library%20-%20ZhongGuoYin__Xue%202005.4%20001.png

I have not noticed such usage in Japanese fwiw, but in Chinese it seems fairly common. I think it's important for us to represent such common and typical semantic differentiations in CSS generically. Whether we do so through generic font families, `font-style`, or some other mechanism, it doesn't matter. But it needs to be possible for a document without access to downloadable fonts to be able to make such necessary distinctions.

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Received on Tuesday, 12 May 2020 04:41:14 UTC