Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-fonts] Font Sizing for Readability (#6709)

While `font-size-adjust` has gotten somewhat worse in support (I did not realize it stopped working in Chrome, that's frustrating), it's still better than the *zero* browser support that a new property would have. You can't solve "lack of implementation" by adding a new, as-yet-unimplemented-either feature. We should only change the feature if we think the current design is bad and could be done better.

Rereading your posts (apologies, skimming your original post; it's quite long), I don't immediately see a meaningful difference between `font-size-adjust` and `font-ex-size`. They both do exactly the same thing - cause the font to render at a particular size such that its x-height matches a given length. The only difference is whether they specify that length directly (as in your proposed `font-ex-size`) or as a fraction of the `font-size` (as in `font-size-adjust`). Can you briefly explain why you think one works better than the other?

`font-size-adjust` has the additional benefit that, as it's named and designed in a size-agnostic way, one can adjust the font-size relative to *other* metrics, like cap size. With `font-ex-size`, you instead need to define a separate `font-cap-size`, and define which one "wins" when they're both specified. (And in either case, they have to "win" over `font-size`, meaning they function as a mode switch - you have to know that the element is currently having its font size set by `font-ex-size` rather than `font-size`, and either use the matching property, or reset it so you can use a different property.)

(Instead allowing the `font-size` property to take a keyword along with a length (`font-size: 8px ex-size;`) would have been an alternate way to go that doesn't have this "mode switching" problem. It was indeed proposed; it was decided against, in favor of `font-size-adjust`, to ease adoption pain, since generally the size adjustment should be small relative to the "normal" font-size, and so continuing to use the normal `font-size` in downlevel user agents would be acceptable. I somewhat disagree that this was a great decision, and we could revisit it, but that, too, would have the same "defining a new unimplemented feature to fix another feature not being implemented yet" issue.)

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Received on Tuesday, 30 April 2024 23:44:56 UTC