Re: [css3-fonts] "font-feature-settings: none" shorthand?

Glenn Adams wrote: 

> > > My interpretation of that is "ideological fascism". In any case,
> > > I'm not proposing something that can't be expressed already. I'm
> > > just proposing a shorthand. It is irrelevant if the shorthand
> > > makes it easier for an author to abuse himself. 
> > 
> > Um, discussions of fascism aside I don't think what you're describing 
> > is any sort of improvement over: 
> > 
> > font-variant: none; 
> > font-feature-settings: normal; 
> > 
> > This is pretty dang close to what you've described as the use case. 
> 
> Not really. 
> 
> Let's say for script S, the following features are enabled by default: 
> 
> 'ccmp' 
> 'liga' 
> 'loca' 
> 'kern' 
> 'mark' 
> 'mkmk' 
> 
> Now I could specify: 
> 
> font-feature-settings: 
> 'ccmp' off, 
> 'liga' off, 
> 'loca' off, 
> 'kern' off, 
> 'mark' off, 
> 'mkmk' off; 
> 
> that is, if I happen to know that the implementation enables these
> by default and that the font I'm using uses these, or I could
> specify: 
> 
>   font-feature-settings: none; 
> 
> or, if you prefer, 
> 
>   font-feature-settings: off; 
> 
> or, if you prefer a wildcard: 
> 
>   font-feature-settings: * off; 
> 
> In any case, this is not what you get by: 
> 
>   font-variant: none; font-feature-settings: normal; 

Of those features you've listed, I think only ligatures and kerning
would be default features that an author would disable to achieve an
"all features off" state:

  font-variant: none;
  font-kerning: none;
  font-feature-settings: normal;

That's a much more natural expression of "all features off".

I think the problem here is that you're equating an author's wish to
disable typographic features as meaning literally "turn off the
OpenType layout engine".  I don't think they are the same, hence I
don't think a 'none' property value or wildcard notation serves a real
use case.

> Frankly, this is a very straightforward syntactic shorthand, easily
> implementable (if one supports font-feature-settings at all). 

No doubt it's easy to implement, but the question is whether this
would do more harm than good.

Cheers,

John Daggett

Received on Friday, 31 May 2013 07:18:07 UTC