Re: font features in CSS

Thomas Phinney 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 don't think you necessarily want to put this sort of stuff right in
> the @font-face declaration, however. You spec the font in a more
> global way, and want to apply formatting much more locally. I don't
> want to have to re-spec the font just to turn on swash caps or get a
> fraction... seems unnecessary and undesirable.

This argument makes sense. But I still think font-specific things like
alternate glyph sets should be tied to the font somehow.

~fantasai

Received on Friday, 30 October 2009 20:26:28 UTC