CSS Draft 8/95: prioritised fount lists

In response to my request for a more sublte font selection scheme for
CSS, in short

  I propose to change the value of "font" to 
  	[ size [/leading] family [weight] [style] ]+
  very much like the value of "font-family." This would allow the following:
      font = 
  	12pt/14pt bembo demi-bold
  	12pt/12pt new-century-schoolbook
  	12pt/14pt times 

Håkon W. Lie writes

	You propose to group a set of properties and only apply the
	values if all of them can successfully be set. The basic
	problem is: how do you define success? [Example deleted]

I'm not sure why this is so much more difficult than with the scheme
in the 10 August draft. There, I could write

	font-family = bembo new-century-schoolbook times

and the browser has the same problem of deciding whether the
(fictive) recently released Bembo-New-Style is a successful match for
"Bembo" or it schould fall back on Times.

So here is my "major change in functionality":

Go through the list of font names in "font" until you find a match
(using the same rules that would be needed to implement the 10 August
CSS proposal to read the prioritised list that follows
"font-family"). Choose that font, with the weight, style, font size
and leading specified in that line.

Obviously, problems arise if and when Bembo is available, but not in
demi-bold 12 pt. But these problems are identical to the ones that
would arise from the following (which is ok according the the draft
proposal): 

	font-family: bembo new-century-schoolbook times
	font-size: 12pt
	font-leading: 14pt
	font-weight: demi-bold

To summarise: I can see that Håkon's comment is a valid reason to
entirely drop the prioritised font name lists from the draft
specification. My proposal has exactly the same problems, but is more
useful when and if the browser finds a match. 

Regards,
Thore Husfeldt
thore@daimi.aau.dk

Received on Monday, 11 September 1995 04:26:37 UTC