Re: [css3-fonts] Nested 'bolder' and 'lighter' question

On Aug 27, 2008, at 3:10 PM, Nicholas Shanks wrote:

> On 27 Aug 2008, at 8:23 pm, fantasai wrote:
>
>> fantasai wrote:
>>
>>> What should Text D be? Bold or normal?
>>
>> I would say bold, if I were being so bold. -- Andy Clarke
>>
>> I say it goes to normal. -- Molly Holzschlag
>
>
> I vote with Molly.
>
> Use case:
>
> Text spans A, B, and C are all written by different authors (e.g.  
> some kind of aggregated content), who happen to be called A, B and  
> C. Text D is written by Author C
>
> B doesn't know A has made the container of his text bolder, and
> C doesn't know B has made the container of her text bolder
>
> Author C expects her content to be in a normal weight, and applies  
> ‘lighter’ to some portion of that. Author C wants span containing  
> text D to look different from the surrounding text. So it should go  
> from Bold to Normal, regardless of the failure earlier of Author B  
> to force C's text to be emboldened.


That's one use case, but not the only one. There are others where the  
author may be repeating blocks down the page, some with ABCD children  
and others with just ABD or ACD, but where he always wants the weight  
of the inner-most span to be consistent. And since he originally  
wanted it to be Bold, then the page should not make it something else.

Just because C didn't end up being the proper weight doesn't mean that  
D should also be incorrect.

Instead of trying to guess the author's intent, the UA should just  
concentrate on minimizing the damage. Thus C would be the only weight  
that was substituted (for its nearest equivalent).

You can imagine it mathematically, in which normal is 0, each "bolder"  
is +1 to the weight ,and each "lighter" is -1. Thus, D = +1+1-1 = +1  
boldness. That's something that is then very simple and predictable,  
and predictability is important, especially on a large site.

Here is an even simpler example (only one bolder and one lighter):

<a>
   Here is some interesting things that I found on the Web the other  
day.

<b style="font-weight: bolder">
     Interesting Stuff:
     <c style="font-weight: lighter">
       73.9 % of all stats are made up.
     </c>
     <c style="font-weight: lighter">
       There are 2 kinds of people in this world: 1) Those who can  
count.
     </c>
   </b>

   <b style="font-weight: bolder">
     <c style="font-weight: lighter">
       No content in this one's parent. So nothing for it to be  
noticeably lighter than except A. But the parent might still be there  
for other reasons.
     </c>
   </b>

</a>

Now suppose, for the sake of the example, that I don't have any bold  
fonts, but I do have normal and light. If we did it your way, then  
A=normal, B=normal, C=light. But that is clearly not what the author  
was expecting. If the font doesn't have bold, then all of these should  
be normal weight.

Received on Thursday, 28 August 2008 16:48:55 UTC