Re: font features in CSS

John Daggett wrote:
> fantasai wrote:
> 
>>> Yes, the appropriateness is font-specific, but with @font-face we are
>>> soon going to be fairly sure about what font we are getting, much of
>>> the time (and with the font fallback stack we can be sure to specify
>>> as fallback something that is unlikely to trigger an undesired result
>>> for selecting alternate ampersand #27).
>> I think you're much too optimistic about this. Maybe on desktops in
>> the broadband world there will be enough consistency that you can
>> ignore the few percent of anomalies, but in other environments font
>> downloads are just as likely to be either not available for the
>> device/OS or turned off due to limited download speeds or memory.
> 
> I definitely understand the problem with font-specific feature settings
> like stylesets being applied to fallback fonts but I think this argument
> is dubious, I highly doubt any device that's disabling downloadable
> fonts because of size/speed concerns would be one fully supporting all
> the features of OpenType layout *and* contain fallback fonts with
> font-specific features enabled!!  
> 
> Maybe iPhone 4GS-loving penguins in Antartica would be affected perhaps...  ;)

How about people on a MacBook Pro on an overloaded dial-up connection?
Or people on dial-up who have to pay per megabyte? Some countries have
such systems. I might want to turn off font downloads if I'm on such a
system; doesn't mean I don't have a full-fledged OpenType engine with
a set of high-quality fonts installed locally.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 2 November 2009 17:35:54 UTC