Re: FW: Font-family specification

Chris Wilson writes
> I sent this a couple days ago, but our mail service burped and ate it.  :^( 
>  I'll try again.

Snap.  We have a 24hour + lag on mail delivery this week, so sorry if
this reply is not timely or the issue is already resolved.


> I stated a while ago that I would like to see the font-family specification 
> change from a whitespace-separated list, with spaces in font names changed 
> to dashes, to a comma-separated list, with whitespace allowed in font family 
> names. 

I would also like to see spaces allowed in font names.  This could be
done by choosing some character as a separator (such as the comma Chris
suggests)

H1.foo { font-family: new century schoolbook, serif }

or alternatively by quoting 

H1.foo { font-family: 'new century schoolbook' serif }

My personal preference is for items in lists of alternatives (such as
fonts, colours, etc) to be delimited by something other than whitespace.

Using whitespace as a token, or in general making whitespace
significant, often seems to be a problem.  Many of us will have
expreience of such problems while trying to produce valid HTML (oh, you
can't put a space or a line break *there*)

> 1) Commas are rarely if ever used in font names; spaces are widely used. 
>  Some of the most popular fonts on the Microsoft Windows platform (remember, 
> it is the most popular OS out there) have spaces in their names (e.g., 
> "Times New Roman") - to force document authors to make this translation is, 
> I believe, foolish.  Although ideally all stylesheets will be authored by 
> machine, not by hand, this is unrealistic in the short term.

I do not believe this is a platform issue.  However, there are no font
faces on all the platforms (all X based) I have access to that use
commas in the file names.  There are several examples with spaces.

> 4) Most importantly, spaces need to be preserved in font names for copyright 
> reasons.  This actually means the names need to be preserved completely, but 
> I'm assured commas are not a problem.  In a quick look at the 58 fonts 
> installed on my system, none of them use commas, but only 14 of them do 
> *NOT* use spaces in their names.

I will add another (not very strong) reason.  On the X platform, hyphens
are used in font names, for example:

-adobe-new century schoolbook-bold-i-normal--20-140-100-100-p-111-iso8859-1
-daewoo-mincho-medium-r-normal--16-120-100-100-c-160-ksc5601.1987-0

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
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Received on Friday, 26 January 1996 13:47:42 UTC