- From: Thomas Phinney <tphinney@cal.berkeley.edu>
- Date: Tue, 3 Mar 2009 09:56:23 -0800
- To: Michael Day <mikeday@yeslogic.com>
- Cc: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>, www-style <www-style@w3.org>
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 1:41 AM, Michael Day <mikeday@yeslogic.com> wrote: > Hi Thomas, > >> I'm also curious, what field you use to define "family" in this >> context? (Some platforms/APIs may consider, say, "Arial Black Italic" >> part of the "Arial" family, and others might consider it part of the >> "Arial Black" family....) > > What field in the font? That's up to the platform. If the user says: > > font: italic 12pt Arial Black > > then the font-family is "Arial Black", but if they say: > > font: 900 italic 12pt Arial > > then the font-family is "Arial", and "Arial Black" may not be chosen if it > is considered a completely different font-family by the platform. > > I don't consider this a problem, personally, and it hasn't come up as an > issue thus far. However, I would make a call to the typographers in the > audience to group related fonts under a single family if possible :) I beg to differ, it certainly *has* come up as an issue for application developers. They've assumed that they have to live with the existing mess. If the notion of "family" is platform-defined means that CSS font definitions based on family+style are inherently not cross-platform for any family more sophisticated than four members, and trying to deal with such families is likely to lead to frustration. Only because the available/usable fonts have been so restricted has it not surfaced as a "real" issue. Because of this, my conclusion has always been that CSS was fundamentally broken as far as font selection is concerned. Regards, T
Received on Tuesday, 3 March 2009 17:57:04 UTC