Re: text or font properties

MWhisman@aol.com wrote:
> 
> I'd like to suggest these font or text properties for CSS.
> 
> 1.      "slab-serif" as a generic font-family value for what typographers call slab
> serif or Egyptian or Clarendon fonts, e.g.
> 
> font-family: 'Serifa', 'Bookman', 'Clarendon', 'New Century Schoolbook', slab-
> serif;

Thats a bit specific to western typography. We already have Japanese
typographers claiming that "serif" is not really equivalent to "Mincho",
and "sans-serif" not really equivalent to "Gothic", and similarly for
Arabic faces - flared stroke terminations are not realy serifs.
Difficult to see how slab serifs could apply there.

If you particularly want readers to see slab serifs, your choices are to
specify a goodly list of them, or to use a downloadable WebFont, or to
declare the Panose 1 number of the fonts you prefer and allow clients to
make a better substitution.

> 2.      "font-width" to describe the horizontal scale or width desired, with legal
> values
> something like these:

I agree that this is useful, if only to ensure that "font-family"
continues to mean "font-family" rather than
"some-subset-of-font-family". In otherwords, Helvetica Condensed is the
samne font family as Helvetica.

The good news - already done in CSS2, see
  http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/fonts.html#propdef-font-stretch

--
Chris

Received on Wednesday, 2 December 1998 10:49:48 UTC