Re: CSS21 @font-face removal

> [Original Message]
> From: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
> To: <www-style@w3.org>
> Date: 10/20/2003 7:58:53 PM
> Subject: Re: CSS21 @font-face removal
>
>
> On Monday, Oct 20, 2003, at 20:12 Europe/Helsinki, Tex Texin wrote:
>
> > If a browser supports Unicode, then all that may be  needed to display 
> > the
> > script is the font.
> >
> > There seems to be an assumption that displaying minority scripts must 
> > require a
> > concerted effort and a specialized system.
> > It doesn't need to be the case. Certainly some scripts are complex to 
> > display.
> > Others are in the minority not because they are technologically 
> > difficult but
> > because there are not many speakers.
>
> For example, Mac OS X doesn't come bundled with a font for Georgian, 
> but will render Georgian text (encoded as Unicode) if a font is 
> supplied. If a person wants to read Georgian and runs Mac OS X, why 
> wouldn't (s)he install a suitable font instead of relying on Web sites 
> to provide fonts via @font-face? Surely it is reasonable to expect 
> (s)he wants to read Georgian even when the site author isn't providing 
> a font or when the text being read isn't a Web page.

I can think of two use cases where expecting the user to have the
needed fonts is not reasonable.

The first use case is for documents that are a tutorial or reference
to the script or a language which uses that script.  In such cases,
expecting the user to have already acquired and installed
the necessary font is not reasonable.

The second is an esthetic use case.  It is unfortunate, but often
the set of fonts a user has is such that documents that use
multiple scripts are rendered using different fonts which are
jarringly out of style with one another,  As a result, an author of
a multi-script document might wish to provide a font that covers
all of the scripts used to ensure uniformity of presentation.

However, these points I have raised only serve to show that
@font-face is desirable.   I am unaware of two interoperable
implementations of @font-face, so unless someone can
 provide them, I have no objections to the non-inclusion of
@font-face in CSS 2.1

Received on Monday, 20 October 2003 14:48:52 UTC