Re: @font-face rules

Erik van der Poel wrote:

> >   User agents are encouraged to allow users to select
> >   alternative choices for the generic fonts.
> 
> However, the 2nd paragraph of CSS2's section 15.2.6 says:
> 
>   All five generic font families are defined to exist in all CSS
>   implementations
> 
> What happens if the document author's style sheet specifies some
> non-existent font for one of the generic fonts? 

I woiuld suggest detecting this at the time the user selects the font,
if this happensd in a UI. 

However, I would also regard any user-specified generic fonts as an
addition to a list, rather than as a replacement.

If you don't find the required glyph in all the fonts in a list -
including the generic font, if specified - then you fall off the end and
can use any font you want.

So, in the situatuon where the font for 'serif' used to be "foo" but is
now "bar", I don't see a problem with searching "foo" if youalready
searched "bar" and are about to fall off the end of the list.

> Should the
> implementation then look at the user's style sheet? Or should we ignore
> @font-face rules for generic fonts in author style sheets to begin with?

Certainly the intention was to provide this facility for user and
ua-default stylesheets. But the flipside of the CSS reader/author
balance is that it is difficult to prevent authors using this too.

> 
> (Thanks for your patience. I hope this is the right mailing list for
> these questions!)

Yes, it is, although since you are an employee of a W3C Member you can
also ask the folks in the CSS WG directly if you want. 

--
Chris

Received on Saturday, 20 November 1999 16:39:19 UTC