- From: Chris Lilley via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:45:44 +0000
- To: public-css-archive@w3.org
> Taking a step back, I think requiring users to proactively configure something in order to be able to view a website goes against our shared objectives for the web as a platform. Absolutely. Especially for pages that have correctly rendered for decades. In general we should avoid this sort of unexpected regression. But when it does happen, at minimum the affected users should have some means to fix it. > Any solution needs to be something browsers are comfortable enabling by default, that all users benefit from without them having to take additional steps. Agreed. Although "additional steps" is better than "unrecoverable". > In the longer term, we should be looking at enhancements to Unicode, to the fonts bundled with operating systems, to Web Fonts, to Incremental Font Transfer, to the WebExtensions API, etc. Yes. Unpacking those in order: - **Unicode**, which constantly adds new characters. That is a benefit, but it exposes a problem (next item) - **fonts bundled with OS**. Where platform-installed fonts are not updated in a timely manner (in some cases, with a _decade_ lag or more). On platforms where users are able to install fonts there is a workaround (user installs newer version) unless the browser chooses to ignore the more recent version. - **Web fonts**. In general, new pages should reference webfonts rather than rely on named preinstalled fonts. (Unmaintained legacy content of course won't do that, and still needs to be supported). But for some languages (such as Chinese and Japanese) web fonts have near-zero use because of size. Which leads to - **IFT**, where a small subset font is loaded first and then incrementally extended as needed. That copes with the "my Chinese font lacks glyphs for these ten characters that were added to Unicode last year" problem. It also deals with the "this font renders incorrectly for this particular language" problem, when that is caused by static subsetting into multiple fonts. I'm unaware of how WebExtensions API figures into this, could you elaborate? -- GitHub Notification of comment by svgeesus Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/11753#issuecomment-2704057691 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Thursday, 6 March 2025 14:45:45 UTC