Re: Another cut on the Character-Transform Property

> A general problem of the draft, from a typographic perspective, is
> that the terminology is often not that used by typographers. Apart
> from being confusing, this leads some of my colleagues -- notably
> David Berlow -- to question the W3C's credibility in defining
> typographic features. The target audience for advanced typographic
> features in CSS is presumably people who know something about
> typography, so presenting information in terminology that is familiar
> to those people is probably a good idea.

Agreed.  I should note here that I'm the one writing the text of the
CSS3 Fonts draft so many of these mistakes are probably mine.  The
draft is written with input from others in the CSS WG, others posting
on the www-style list and people that I contact directly for feedback.
I'm always happy to hear criticisms and understand where issues
exist.  If text in the draft is misleading to some, we should fix
that, but I would ask for your patience and understanding as part of
that process. W3C specs are generally collabrative in nature and rely
on this process to flush out mistakes and imperfections like this.

The flip side of this is that advanced typographic features need to be
specified and described in a way that is understandable and usable by
web authors in general, and not exclusively by those intimately
familiar with the subtleties of OpenType layout.  Vocabulary or terms
used by typographers like "scripts" or "layout" mean something
slightly different to web authors who might naturally associate these
with Javascript and the CSS box model.  The spec should describe these
features in a way that is clear and concise without confusing either
typographers, web authors or those who are both.

John Daggett
Mozilla Japan

Received on Monday, 5 April 2010 02:26:00 UTC