Re: [css3-fonts] font-language-override: substantive comments

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the example.  However, you're mixing up a couple things I think.

> A practical example would be the fonts Myanmar Text, a system font
> on Windows 8 which has a language system "KAR" for the Karen
> languages ant Padauk and Padaik Book which has a language system for
> S'gaw Karen 'ksw'.
> 
> If a web developer uses the Padauk font and if browsers fall back to
> Myanmar Text, there needs to be a way of expressing that. Default
> rendering, ie Burmese/Mon rendering isn't suitable.

Language sensitive features are primarily determined by the content
language of an element, for HTML the 'lang' tag.  So language-specific
behavior can be mapped from a ISO-639 lang tag to the data in the font:

  <p lang="ksw">...

I think what you seem to be asking for is language system fallback,
such that if lang="ksw" wasn't available in the font, you'd use
lang="kar" instead, rather than the default lang="my".  Am I getting
this right?

The 'font-language-override' is only meant as an *override* for when
you want to mimic the features of a different language system. 
Specifying the lang attribute is the intended way for authors to
indicate the language of their content.

The 'font-language-override' property is also defined in terms of
*OpenType* language codes, not in terms of ISO 639 lang codes.  Padauk
is a Graphite font that supports language-specific features via ISO
639 lang codes.  It doesn't support OpenType shaping, so
'font-language-override' doesn't apply in this case.

Rather than relying on fancy fallback behavior, it would be much better
to simply use a downloadable font that has the features you need.

Cheers,

John Daggett

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2013 07:03:46 UTC