Re: [css-fonts-3] i18n-ISSUE-294: Fonts available on platforms

--On Thursday, September 12, 2013 18:54 +0100 Richard Ishida
<ishida@w3.org> wrote:

> 4.1. The @font-face rule
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-css-fonts-3-20130711/#font-face-r
> ule
> 
> 
> Editorial nit
> 
> nit: "rather than limiting the font choice to a set of fonts
> available on all platforms" -> "rather than limiting the font
> choice to a set of fonts available on the user's platform"

Richard,

Sorry for not spotting this earlier, but it seems to me that
this is a little more subtle and the original text might be
correct (although confusing).

The following are all potentially different collections:

(1) The common set of fonts that all platform developers or
packagers have available have decided to include.  This set is
volatile because a new platform could come along and its
designers could make different choices.  But I think it is what
the original text says.

(2) The minimum set of fonts that W3C believes must be present
in a competent web implementation.  I don't believe I've seen
such a list, but it would, in principle, be possible to build
one.  It would, at least, be more stable than (1).

(3) The list of fonts shipped with the platform on which the
user is operating and configured by default.

(4) The list of fonts shipped with the platform on which the
user is operating and, while not configured by default, easily
configurable by the user.  

(5) The list of fonts actually available, platform-wide, to the
user.  This could be equal to (3) or (4) plus fonts added by the
user by other mechanisms, less fonts in (3) that the user has
chosen to get rid of.  

(6) Since some systems allow applications to embed their own
fonts and drawing mechanisms, category (5) plus whatever is
available to the CSS-invoking application(s).

I think your corrected text would refer to categories (5) or (6)
or perhaps (3) or (4) but I'm not entirely sure which one.

I note that the population of some of these categories may be
quite hard to figure out on a platform or user basis. 

Whichever is intended, more precision would probably be a good
idea.  

    john

Received on Friday, 13 September 2013 12:00:14 UTC