- From: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>
- Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:56:50 -0700 (PDT)
- To: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
- Cc: www-style <www-style@w3.org>, "L. David Baron" <dbaron@dbaron.org>
fantasai wrote: > On 03/23/2010 08:24 PM, L. David Baron wrote: >> On Tuesday 2010-03-23 16:23 -0700, fantasai wrote: >>> The problem with this proposal is that it doesn't roundtrip very >>> well. If I start at 300 and go bolder, then lighter, I don't get >>> back to my >> >> Is there a use case for that? Is lighter inside bolder something we >> expect to be common? In what cases? Do they rely on this invariant? > > I don't have any expectations of whether it would be common or > uncommon, but I find it disturbing that round-tripping would not work > for so many starting values and that in a font with 9 weights as soon > as you start using 'bolder' or 'lighter' you drop out half the > possible weights. If there's no good reason to break this, I don't > think we should. I don't see the importance of round tripping in this case, it's the clear visual distinction between weights that's important with bolder/lighter. Authors expect bolder to mean a distinct change in weight and subtle weight changes don't give that, shifting from regular to medium for example. For a concrete example, consider the Helvetica Neue family provided with Mac OS X. The page below explains how an additional weight affects page rendering: http://emps.l-c-n.com/notebook/HelveticaNeue-font-weight "With the release of OS X 10.6, Apple provides one additional face: ‘Medium’, with font-weight: 500. For a web developer (and more so for the end–user of a web page…), this results in a small surprise. When viewing a page that contains <strong> or <b> elements with a Gecko based browser, those elements suddenly look much less dark or fat than they used to on OS X 10.5. This is not unexpected, as the Gecko UA stylesheet (html.css) specifies b, strong {font-weight: bolder;}. The browser looks for a face that is one weight heavier than the previous one and finds the Medium face of Helvetica Neue." > The table I came up with has equivalent behavior to John's for a > 100,400,700,900 font. Assuming you're mapping to the font tables > after calculating the computed value (which is what I thought we'd > agreed on), I don't see why we need to lose precision here for fonts > with a greater range of weights. Relative weights are used for visual distinction. Authors can use specific weights for more precise control. It's unfortunate that you're bringing this up now, a year after this was discussed and agreed upon at the March 2009 F2F. During the discussion then you were chatting online and giggling, I remember thinking "I'm not that funny". :P
Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2010 06:57:24 UTC