- From: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:18:46 -0500
- To: Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>
- Cc: "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>
On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Thomas Lord<lord@emf.net> wrote: > Two general sets of ideas seem to show up in the > font discussion that I think can be persuasively > argued against as general categories. > > These ideas are: > > 1. Requirements that browsers sometimes > refuse to render with a font that is > at hand to the browser. > > 2. New formats whose rationale is to be > different from existing font formats. > > > Refutations: > > 1. A requirement that a browser simply > decide to not render with a given font > has the fatal flaw that it contributes > nothing at all to interoperability. Actually, it contributes to interoperability with the font itself, which is a piece of software. The font is expected to behave in certain ways (even if that means NOT rendering), and the browser is making that happen. > And that bug is a bad bug: it can present a > threat to life and limb when a life critical > resource goes un-rendered in a time of desparate > need. The user would get fallback to some other font. The results would be no worse than they are today. Making the results consistent across browsers would help make them predictable as well. If a given web site with an improperly handled font link doesn't render on any browser, nobody would expect otherwise. Giving more freedom to browsers to behave differently from each other in this regard would be the increased risk in terms of getting expected results. Cheers, T
Received on Friday, 26 June 2009 20:19:27 UTC