Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-fonts-5] advance-override details (#5983)

I agree with [@xiaochengh's comment](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5983#issuecomment-799770586) about applying to grapheme clusters rather than individual characters; this will generally be less broken.

However, I also agree with [@fantasai's point](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5983#issuecomment-789898142) that `advance-override` is fundamentally broken for many writing systems. It has the potential to be a harmful feature that hurts typography and even accessibility on the web.

I believe that the use cases that prompted the invention of `advance-override` would in every case be better served by a [scaling descriptor](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/6075#issuecomment-799915767), and the better way forward is for browsers to implement this.

@xiaochengh has already experimented with scaling the font size instead of overriding glyph advances, and reported that it [does seem to work better](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5533#issuecomment-714166725). I have also [prototyped such a feature in Gecko](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698495) and it seems to work as expected there.

In the light of this, I propose that we should *reverse* the resolution in #5533 to add the `advance-override` descriptor, and instead focus on spec'ing and shipping the [scaling descriptor](https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/6075#issuecomment-799915767), as being fundamentally better (and more useful).


-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by jfkthame
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5983#issuecomment-800123577 using your GitHub account


-- 
Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config

Received on Tuesday, 16 March 2021 10:05:15 UTC