Re: [css3-fonts] new editor's draft posted

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 4:04 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 2011-03-07 at 11:31 -0800, John Daggett wrote:
> > Last week I committed a new revision of the CSS3 Fonts editor's draft.
>
> Some personal comments
>
> > Key changes include:
> >
>
> In section 5,
> [[
> If a font family defined via @font-face rules contains only invalid font
> data, it should be considered as if a font was present but contained an
> empty character map; matching a platform font with the same name must
> not occur in this case.
> ]]
> seems to mean that if you have an @font-face rule for an EOT Palatino
> (say) and your browser doesn't support Palatino, the system Palatino
> font must never be used as a fallback; that seems suboptimal.
>
> I think Liam meant to say "and your browser doesn't support EOT"... but I
agree wholeheartedly with his point.


> 6.3 font-kerning should mention what to do about common-ligatures (and
> possibly should explain what kerning is :-) )


Kerning probably doesn't need to interact with ligatures; tracking however
probably does.

> * Section 6.12 font-feature-settings syntax
> > http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-fonts/#font-feature-settings-prop
> >
> > The syntax for access to low-level OpenType features is now more
> > CSS-like rather than a long string of tag-value pairs.
>
> I am not convinced by making all of the hard-coded sub-properties.
> The stability of the Adobe opentype feature registry isn't clear,


That's a vague statement. Could you be more specific? Historically, the
OpenType feature registry has:
- had some significant flux in some complex script areas, even relatively
recently (the last five years)
- had a few other deprecations, but not many, and mostly quite a few years
ago (8+)
- had a lot of other additions in the late 90s and very early 2000's, and
very few since

Also, why do you call it the "Adobe" registry? Adobe and Microsoft share a
single registry.


> and I think having "low-level" and "high-level" access to the same features
> confusing


I can understand this concern, even if I don't want to give up the low-level
access.

That being said, a lot of decisions about what to do with the high-level
access seem to be predicated on the assumption that there is also low-level
access for the people who will be unhappy with certain limitations being
imposed by the high-level access.

- you can turn ligatures on with one property and off again
> with another, they are not orthogonal.


True.


>  In addition, as new features are
> added from time to time, or for other font formats, CSS would need to be
> updated.
>

I don't believe there's a lot to worry about here. The frequency of other
outline font formats emerging as meaningful standards is likely to be no
more than the frequency of other major changes to CSS. We've only had two or
three over the whole history of digital fonts, and they take a long time to
be widely adopted, because of compatibility issues. This stuff is pretty
glacial. I mean, geez, the OpenType spec came out more than 15 years ago,
and nothing else seems at all likely to replace it any time soon.

Don't get me wrong: no objection to trying to make something that can easily
embrace other future formats (or changes to OpenType). But compared to the
web, font formats evolution is on a geological time scale.

Regards,

T

-- 
“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone,
 somewhere, may be happy.”
 —H.L. Mencken