Re: font features in CSS

Bert Bos wrote:
>>> Moreover, I don't think it is a requirement that CSS supports all
>>> OT features. A handful of the more common ones is enough. If a
>>> designer wants a specific feature of a specific font, he can make a
>>> new font (or a virtual font) in which that feature is turned on.
>>> That's what we have @font-face for.

Bert,

I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by "that feature is turned
on". Certainly, for the simplest case of one-to-one substitutions, one
can imagine remapping the alternate glyphs to Unicode codepoints of
their source glyphs, and creating static subsets holding such fonts. But
this is not a workable solution for many OpenType Layout features that
involve positioning, one-to-many substitutions, many-to-one
substitutions (e.g. ligatures) or contextual substitutions.

I realize the desire for CSS to remain agnostic with regard to specific
techniques, but I don't believe this is always practical. For example,
CSS specifically picks one particular color model (RGB) rather than
being color-model-agnostic. Web standards such as HTML or XML often
refer to other international standards such as ISO/IEC 10646 / Unicode,
so it is practical to remember that OpenType has been standardized as
Open Font Format (ISO/IEC 14496-22).

Finally, typography is the very core and essence of the web. The web has
been created with hypertext in mind, and hypertext heavily relies on
typography.

Best,
Adam

-- 

Adam Twardoch
| Language Typography Unicode Fonts OpenType
| twardoch.com | silesian.com | fontlab.net

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