Re: Advanced Font Features

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Christoph Päper wrote:
> 
> Returning to the practical situation, I wouldn't suggest taking much 
> trouble in defining new cool features before browsers can at least 
> distinguish between italics and oblique and stop treating them as the 
> same. Specifically, font-style: italic should be ignored when the font 
> has no italics version.

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-styling

"A value of 'italic' selects a font that is labeled 'italic', or, if
that is not available, one labeled 'oblique'."

In CSS, where the designer doesn't know what set of fonts will be
available when the page is rendered, this makes a lot of sense. If
font-style: italic fell back to a different font's italic it would
look noticeably weird. And if it fell back to a normal font, then
we have lost what is often an important distinction between the
italicized text and the surrounding text.

Also most people use "italic" when they mean "either italic or oblique"
because they don't know what an oblique is.

~fantasai

Received on Saturday, 19 January 2008 14:15:17 UTC