Re: font features in CSS

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...  ;)

John Daggett